The written characters, origin and development of Cantonese words in Guangdong local records of Qing dynasty = 清代廣東地方志粵方言詞的書寫用字、源流及發展

Abstract

Finding appropriate written characters for Cantonese words is one of the essential steps of the preservation of Chinese dialects. For many years, Chinese dialects had been suppressed by the Chinese society due to a series of mistaken beliefs in terms of aesthetics, politics and education. Although these misunderstanding have been easing in recent years, a decline of dialects has raised public awareness that leads to a preservation campaign. In this campaign, scholars have been facing the difficulty in standardizing the written characters of dialect words. Although the selection methods of Chinese characters used to write various dialects are complex and diverse, and in some cases different characters are used to write the same word even within one dialect, the standardization of written characters for each dialect is an inevitable process to achieve the preservation work, as well as better communication and understanding. To tackle this issue, this study takes Cantonese as an example, providing feasible methods to find appropriate characters of Cantonese words.

Despite the initial and irreplaceable written Cantonese materials contained, Guangdong local records of the Qing Dynasty were not intended for academic research on written characters of Cantonese words. Guangdong local records are encyclopedic sets of books recorded various features of the places in Guangdong at the time, including Cantonese, the form of language named after this province and popularly used by its people in several areas. While a considerable number of Guangdong local records had been published in the Ming Dynasty, the dynasty before the Qing, most of them got lost because of wars, political prohibitions, and poor management and storage. In this regard, Qing local records have become the earliest accessible Cantonese materials. Besides, they are also irreplaceable on account of their unique data from a particular area and time. The Cantonese materials they provided are not likely to be found in other existent text references, or even other local records. For these reasons, Qing local records have been used as references of Cantonese studies. However, owing to unprofessional sources and editors, the Cantonese materials in Qing local records were poorly verified. As editors of these political reference books, Qing local officials and scholars failed to identify misinformation and even secondary cited it from its sources. In addition to wrong citations, other problems have also been found in Qing local records, including the use of different characters to write the same Cantonese word in different local records. This shows that the irregular use of written characters has been a thorny issue hanging in the balance for a long time.

Consequently, this study suggests two main methods to find appropriate written characters for Cantonese words. First, retrieving original characters from the origin of Cantonese words. Second, forming new characters according to the development of Cantonese words. This study applies these two methods on the Cantonese words recorded in Qing local records, taking the words written in irregular characters as research objects for independent investigation, and finally proposes the appropriate written characters that depict their meanings and pronunciations.