1 Introduction1
Literacy is usually considered to symbolize a high extent of civilization. Through texts, an enormous amount of knowledge can be maintained and transmitted properly. Texts also leave behind a record of language use over time. Nonetheless, a writing system is not a necessary phase of language development. In fact, the vast majority of human languages lack a writing tradition. This also holds true among Sinitic languages, where a northern prestige variety written in an ideographic system had represented for centuries the written standard, divorced from spoken Sinitic languages until the advent of a Mandarin-based national language in the early 1900s (see Chen 1999 and Hoogervorst, this volume). As such, it is often difficult to investigate issues related to sociohistorical linguistics in other Chinese varieties such as Southern Min, whose informal written form is found only in special genres, such as traditional opera scripts and other performance-based vocal works (van der Loon 1991; Chia, this volume). These texts were essentially created to cater the need of performers who would entertain an audience in front of them.
Lyrics â especially those for pop songs â represent an important additional source for written Cantonese and written Southern Min. These contemporary texts are extremely productive by virtue of the thriving entertainment industry in Hong Kong and Taiwan. In what follows I will first address lyrics of Cantonese pop songs, and later that of Southern Min. In the study of these and other non-Mandarin Sinitic texts, I propose to distinguish between literary-style texts and colloquial-style texts. The former are approximated to the standard conventions of written Chinese, whereas the latter duly represent the written form of a Sinitic vernacular. Using excerpts of two Cantonese pop songs written by contemporary lyricists from Hong Kong, these two styles of texts are exemplified in (1) and (2) respectively. Sung in Cantonese, the songs belong to the same genre of vocal entertainment found in historical Sinitic texts in the south.
It must be noted that style-switching (or borrowing between the standard and a vernacular variety) is a common phenomenon in non-Mandarin Sinitic texts. For instance, the Cantonese negative copula m hai
Nowadays in Hong Kong, lyricists of Cantonese pop songs often choose to write in the literary style, as doing so represents a higher register with a tincture of learned fashion. On the other hand, the Cantonese version of Wikipedia (zh-yue.wikipedia.org) adopts the colloquial style. Similarly, the Southern Min version of Wikipedia (zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org) features the colloquial style, but it is written in the Latin alphabet. By contrast, lyrics of contemporary Taiwanese (a variety of Southern Min) pop songs are written with Chinese characters. As the convention for using characters to write Southern Min is underdeveloped, the writing style found in most Taiwanese lyrics holds somewhat of a middle ground between the literary and colloquial style.2
Examples (3) and (4) below present excerpts of lyrics displaying the two styles of Southern Min texts. The lyrics written in the literary style in (3) are taken from a duet in which a woman sings in Mandarin and a man in Taiwanese. This unusual combination of languages in the song has probably prompted the choice of a style closer to Mandarin (i.e. the literary style). In colloquial-style writing, the sound principle â that is, the approximation of Southern Min pronunciation â represents a favoured strategy for the selection of Chinese characters for a word, e.g. phwey
Taking Cantonese as an example, Table 1.1 summarizes the major differences of these two styles of texts. The literary style, with its vocabulary and grammar largely shared with Standard Chinese,3 is so close to writing in Standard Chinese that it can be considered a variety of written Chinese, readable by everyone literate in Chinese. In contrast, the colloquial-style text is difficult to comprehend for those who do not speak the particular vernacular. Because of this distinction, the aforementioned two styles of non-Mandarin Sinitic texts can be identified.
Literary-style Cantonese versus colloquial-style Cantonese in writing
This distinction is relevant to the rest of this chapter. Historical texts written in Southern Min appear to be of the literary style, or a mix of both styles. In Nai Kia Ki
In spite of the challenges posed by the meagre quantity of texts available for Southern Min, complicated by the issue of writing style, this chapter attempts to discuss some lexical contributions from Southern Min to Sinitic as a whole, underscoring its role in early Sino-European contact and international trade in Southeast Asia and southern China. These include the spread of the terms ang moh
This chapter is organized as follows: a brief ethnographic account of the Hokkien people and their languages is presented in the next section. Then the term ang moh
2 Hokkien: An Ethnographic Outline
The term Hokkien
Distribution of Min languages in China
Situated on the west side of the Taiwan Strait in south-eastern mainland China, Fujian is characterized by extensive mountainous and rugged terrain covering 95% of its land; four small plains lie on the east and southeast coast (Tang 1995: 27). The hills, however, provide excellent plantations for tea cultivation, and famous varieties of oolong tea are found in the Wuyi Mountains
Mazu
Centuries of trade via the Maritime Silk Route have resulted in the establishment of Chinese settlements in various parts of Southeast Asia (Tamura et al. 1997: 70; Miksic 2013: 20; Lee 2013). Natives of southern Fujian who migrated to Southeast Asia between the 1500s and 1940s typically possessed the following characteristics: (a) being a monolingual speaker of Hokkien, (b) believing in Mazu, and (c) engaging in business, such as wholesale or retail trade.5 The majority of Southern Min communities in Southeast Asia have maintained their mother tongue until unfavourable language policies were imposed by governments in the past four decades or so. Under these circumstances, language shifts from Southern Min to a national language precipitated the loss of Hokkien to Burmese in Myanmar, to Indonesian in Indonesia, and to English in Singapore. In the latter country, Mandarin is designated as the âheritage languageâ for ethnic Chinese regardless of their origin (Ding 2016).
3 Ang moh ç´
æ¯ : Contact between Hokkien and European Languages
At the turn of the sixteenth century, during the Age of Discovery in European history, waves of Europeans reached the Far East and established trading ports in Southeast Asia, first led by the Portuguese and Spaniards and then followed by the Dutch, British and French. Fig. 1.2 illustrates the new sea route navigated by Portuguese explorers, who first visited Malacca in 1509 by way of the Cape of Good Hope and southern India, and eventually penetrated South China upon reaching the waters of the Pearl River in 1513.
The sea route from Portugal to the Far East
ADAPTED FROM HUGO REFACHINHOâS MAP; HTTPS://COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA .ORG/WIKI/FILE:PORTUGUESE_DISCOVERIES_AND_EXPLORATIONSV3EN.PNG; LICENSE UNDER CC BY-SA 4.0
It is clear from European accounts that a metropolis had developed in Malacca â where the Chinese, Japanese, and Arabs met for trade over a lengthy period (Lach 1994: 501) â prior to the advent of Portuguese fleets in 1509. A small Hokkien community emerged in Malacca no later than the early fifteenth century (Lee 2013: 406â7). According to Chinese historical accounts (Ma 1451), Chinese communities consisting of natives of southern Hokkien as well as natives of Guangdong were found in various islands of present-day Indonesia, including Sumatra and Java, during Zheng Heâs
Similarly, a considerable Chinese population, the majority of whom were Hokkiens, had resided in Indonesia well before a fleet of four Dutch ships first reached the island of Java in 1596.8 The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was established in 1602 to safeguard Dutch commercial interests in the Far East (Walker 2012: 315). During the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch, under the auspices of the Dutch East India Company, emerged as a leading European power by establishing a number of trading ports in Southeast Asia and Taiwan (Andrade 2007; De Witt 2009). Permanent Dutch trading posts in Indonesia were founded in northwest Java: the first one in 1603 and the second one, also the most important one, in Jayakarta (nowadays Jakarta) in 1611. The 1620s witnessed a series of military conflicts, the âSino-Dutch battlesâ, when the Dutch intention to open a trading port on the shores of Fujian was resisted by the Chinese court (Twitchett & Mote 1998). The Dutch, despite being defeated in the war, were granted permission to exploit the island Taiwan, then regarded to be an offshore frontier of China. After the islandâs Austronesian-speaking aboriginals had been pacified or driven out of the plains in the 1640s, âDutch Formosaâ (1624â62) launched a large campaign to entice natives of southern Fujian to immigrate to the island. In the meantime, Dutch Malacca replaced Portuguese Malacca on the Malay Peninsula by 1641.
Sino-Dutch encounters continued in later centuries. In the mid-nineteenth century, the colonial government requested and supported the training of the first cohort of Dutch Sinologists to be employed as consultants stationed at various Indonesian ports. An emphasis was placed on their ability to speak Southern Min, so that they could assist in the management of local affairs in this Dutch colony (Kuiper 2017).
These encounters raise the question how the Dutch were designated by Hokkien speakers. In present-day Southern Min, especially its Southeast Asian varieties (see Churchman, this volume), the epithet ang moh
3.1 The Spread of Ang moh ç´
æ¯ to Other Sinitic Languages
A Ming-dynasty travel writing titled Yue Jian Bian
è¾ä¸ä¹æéï¼æäºå¤·èè³é¦å±±æ¾³ï¼éäºè 亦ä¸ç¥ä½å人ï¼äººå¼ä¹çº ç´ æ¯é¬¼ ã Around the ninth lunar month in 1601, two foreign boats arrived at Macao. Even the interpreter did not know of their nationality, and people called them red-haired ghosts.
This brief mentioning of the first Chinese encounter with the Dutch in Macao (which by then was on lease to the Portuguese) corroborates the origins of the term ang moh
The word
Southern Min has derived many compounds from ang moh
Nevertheless,
3.2 The Borrowing of Ang moh ç´
æ¯ into Japanese
Through the use of kanji in the Japanese writing system, the term
The first Luso-Japanese contact occurred in September 1543, when a Portuguese boat originally headed for Ningbo
It is also by accident that the first Dutch ship, de Liefde (Love), reached Bungo on the eastern shore of Kyushu in April 1600, having been blown off its original course to the Spice Islands (Maluku, Indonesia) by a violent storm (Goodman 2000: 9). Yet in this case, there was no Chinese person on the ship, which had departed from Holland. Instead, there was an Englishman, William Adams, serving as the pilot. Alongside the Dutch sailor Jan Joosten, the two became the first Europeans granted the title of samurai by a shogun, and they settled in Japan with their new Japanese names: Miura Anjin
Japanese terminology for the Netherlands consists of a pair of synonyms: oranda
3.3 A Synopsis of the Spread of Ang moh ç´
æ¯
Following a general pattern of European contact with China by maritime routes, the Dutch first encountered the Chinese people outside China. More specifically, informal Sino-Dutch contacts began in Indonesia, where the Dutch met Hokkien-speaking Chinese in 1596 or shortly afterwards. This contact led to the creation of the epithetic expression ang moh
4 Diffusion of Southern Min Words into Other Sinitic Languages
Following the promotion of Mandarin in Taiwan by the Chinese Nationalist Party (
The spread and development of ang moh ç´
æ¯
OWN WORK
Dispersed across Southeast Asia from premodern times, Southern Min varieties have long been exposed to a number of tropical products. Naturally, some fruit and vegetable names thus entered Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages via Hokkien, although such etymologies are often not realized by the speech community. Three instances of this are han ji
The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) is currently one of the most widely grown crops in China. It is called han ji in Hokkien and faan syu in Cantonese, written identically as
In recent decades, the durian (Durio zibethinus) has become rather popular in mainland China, being regularly sold at supermarkets in many cities. Misguided by the Chinese characters
The rambutan (Nephelium lappaceum) is another tropical fruit from the Malaysian-Indonesian region. Known in Chinese as
5 Phi jun æ¹å : A Hokkien Hypothesis for the Origin of Pidgin
In the field of Pidgin and Creole Studies, the etymology of the term pidgin has remained unresolved since its inception. A common view, as noted in Oxford English Dictionary, holds that pidgin â or pigeon, as in âpigeon Englishâ, which was in use between 1859 and 1876 â is derived from a Chinese pronunciation of the English word âbusinessâ. This is attributed to the fact that Chinese Pidgin English emerged out of communicative needs for Sino-European trade, hence the presumed connection between pidgin and business. However, there is no linguistic evidence to support this claim. Li et al. (2005) attempt to explain the etymology of pidgin through a Cantonese truncation of âbusinessâ to âbusinâ, yielding bit zin
Belonging to the core vocabulary of Chinese Pidgin English, pidgin is a versatile word that covers many meanings and functions. Leland (1876: 131) listed âbusiness; affair; occupationâ as its basic meanings, providing examples of its derivations such as joss-pidgin âreligionâ and chow-chow-pidgin âeating or cookeryâ. Since semantic extension takes time to accomplish, the word should exist in the mixed language decades before its first appearance in the mid-nineteenth century in the expression written as pigeon English. Hence, by the time pidgin induced substantial interest and attention from scholars, its etymology had been lost.
Throughout the history of expansion of the British Empire in the Far East, contact between English and Sinitic languages took place not only in mainland China, but also in Southeast Asia. Thus, the early formation of Chinese pidgin varieties of English should not be confined to the interaction between the English and Cantonese in the Pearl River Delta region, as has been the case in previous studies (cf. Li et al. 2005; Ansaldo et al. 2010). This assumption has restricted the scope of investigation: linguistically speaking, its focus on Cantonese has led to negligence of other varieties of Sinitic; geographically speaking, it fails to recognize Southeast Asia as a significant region for Anglo-Chinese contact.
To trace the etymological origin of pidgin, an understanding of the sociohistorical settings of British trade in the Far East is necessary. Despite being a relatively late arrival, the British Empire, following the signature of the Anglo- Dutch Treaty of 1824, successfully consolidated its colonies in Southeast Asia. Since then, a vigorous recruitment of Chinese from Fujian and Guangdong contributed to the rapid growth and reinforcement of Chinese communities in British Malaya, including Singapore (Song 1967; Cheng 1985; Lee 2013; Ng 2015). Consequently, Sinitic languages â Southern Min in particular â represented important parts of the linguistic landscape of colonial Southeast Asia. As such, the Malay Peninsula could be regarded the linguistic backyard of the Sinophone even prior to British rule.
5.1 Hokkiens as Major Chinese Traders in Canton and Southeast Asia
Canton (nowadays Guangzhou
As early as the turn of the eighteenth century, a number of merchants from Amoy decided to try their fortune in foreign trade in Canton. The following entrepreneurs, of considerable fame in Canton between the 1700s and 1730s, all hailed from southern Fujian: Limia, Anqua, Kimco, Shabang, Suqua, and Cowlo; each year they travelled regularly between Canton and Fujian (Ng 2015: 174; Van Dyke 2011: 80; Wang 2011, chapter 9). As a matter of fact, Hokkien businessmen dominated the international trade in Canton for most of the eighteenth century (Cheong 1997: 33; Van Dyke 2011: 79). Unsurprisingly, the designation in 1757 of Canton as the exclusive entrepôt for foreign trade spurred more Hokkiens to relocate from southern Fujian to Canton. Their number was so significant that it warranted establishing an association to promote Hokkien identity and solidarity for colleagues residing in Canton (Cheong 1997: 162). Two of the most influential hong merchants in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canton had family origins in southern Fujian. Poankeequa or Puankhequa
Chinese trade with Southeast Asia was conducted in a rather different manner. It was Chinese merchants who played the itinerant role, travelling back and forth between China â southern Fujian, more specifically â and Southeast Asia. As no restrictions were imposed in Southeast Asia on Europeans learning Chinese or Chinese people learning foreign languages, freedom of direct interactions between Europeans and Chinese merchants naturally gave rise to significant language contact not possible under the Canton Trade System. In fact, it was in Malacca that pioneering work by Englishmen on Chinese linguistics came to fruition in the early nineteenth century, yielding Morrisonâs A Grammar of the English Language
5.2 The Emergence of Chinese Pidgin English
According to Van Dyke (2005: 77â78), until the tightening of foreign trade in China in the mid-eighteenth century, communication between European and Chinese merchants relied greatly on the service of bilingual interpreters from Macao, who spoke Portuguese and Cantonese. By the early 1730s, however, it was reported that a simplified form of English, which would develop into what became known as Pidgin English, represented an indispensable communicative tool for foreign trade in Canton. Van Dyke (2011: 13, 124) further notes that throughout most of the eighteenth century, the term âEuropean languageâ or âforeign languageâ was invariably understood by Sino-European traders to be Pidgin English. A licensed linguist, who had to be Chinese, was required to be fluent in Pidgin English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.
A curious comment, however, came from the pioneering Sinologist Robert Morrison (1823b): ânot one of the five licensed linguists in Canton could read or write any foreign language and were not necessarily very skilled even in their own languageâ.22 His comment aptly reflected the sociolinguistic complexity of early-modern China, where diglossia was widespread due to the lack of a national language for verbal communication (Chen 1999). Obliquely, this statement also reveals a dynamic linguistic environment of Sino-European trade from the sixteenth century, involving Portuguese, Dutch, English, and other European languages on the southern and south-eastern shores of China, where a wealth of Sinitic varieties long abounded. As discussed previously, such extensive Sino-European contact was not confined to southern China; rather, it took place all over Southeast Asia, from the mainland to the archipelagos.
Pidgin English, by its very nature, was employed to enable the otherwise impossible exchange of messages between speakers of different languages; literacy in this variety was not expected. Early glossaries of Chinese Pidgin English, as exemplified in Fig. 1.4, often utilized Chinese characters to approximate the pronunciation of English words without providing their actual spelling in the Latin alphabet, e.g.
General foreign speech of the Europeans ç´
æ¯éç¨çªè©± , with a sample page
Photographs without copyright information. The book cover on the left, 
The Pidgin English names of influential Hokkien tycoons, as seen in the records of European traders, reflected their Southern Min pronunciation (Cheong 1997: 24). A name, initially the personal name of the founder of a trading company, would be passed on to successors who inherited the family business, followed by a Roman numeral. Table 1.2 displays names of some of the most famous hong leaders, transcribed in the three Chinese languages most important to early Sino-European trade. At the top of the table, the merchant names are provided in Chinese characters, followed by the year when their name was first recorded in foreign trade and the hometown or family origins of the merchant.25 The rhyming patterns of these Chinese varieties confirm the Hokkien identity of these guild leaders. The absence of a word-final /n/ in the English spelling of the Chinese honorific suffix qua
Transcriptions of the name of famous hong è¡ merchants in Canton
While the personal background of Chinese interpreters is generally lacking in studies on early Sino-European trade, comments on the linguistic ability of Chinese commercial leaders can occasionally be found. For instance, Poankeequa was documented to have travelled on junks from his home village in southern Fujian to Manila at a young age and developed skills in Spanish and (Pidgin) English (Perdue 2010; Van Dyke 2016: 61).27 Cai Hunqua, whose Chinese name is identified as
5.3 Southern Min as a Donor to Chinese Pidgin English
A prolonged, typically peaceful contact between speakers of two languages in a more or less equal relation may give rise to a new variety with mixed features derived from both languages. One example is Pu-Xian
Donor sources of common vocabulary in Chinese Pidgin English
As shown previously in Fig. 1.4, the Chinese made use of Chinese characters to indicate pronunciations of European words. This method resulted in alternate spellings of pidgin words based on the sounds of Chinese, as seen in compladore vs. kam-pat-to and savvy vs. sha-pi. Due to the extensive trade networks in the Far East, even the Japanese contributed a few culture-related words to the repertoire of Chinese Pidgin English.
Among the Sinitic languages, Cantonese donated the largest number of words to Pidgin English, while Hokkien and Mandarin also contributed their fair share. Unlike the character-based diffusion of ang moh
The honorific suffix qua
5.4 Phi jun æ¹å : From âApproveâ to âBusinessâ
The primary duty of an interpreter was to convey messages as accurately as possible. However, the âlinguistsâ servicing foreign and Chinese merchants in Canton had other important duties. Van Dyke (2005: 79â80) reports that âbills of lading, stamped with the appropriate chops, had to accompany all merchandise and bullion shipped between Whampoa and Canton, and it was the job of the linguists to obtain these documentsâ. It is not difficult to imagine numerous permits, which had to be obtained before shipments could be unloaded ashore and would complete the international trade process. From the perspective of European merchants, official approval to unload all cargos from a ship was the final step to a successful long-haul voyage from Europe to China, which would take months depending on the season. No permits effectively meant no business.
Considering the importance attached to official permits in Sino-European trading in Canton, I hypothesize that the frequent use of
The term
Chinese terminology in the domain of commerce and/or laws contains such terms as pi zhun wen jian
Tail-clipping represents another manner to shorten nouns from quadrisyllablic to disyllabic in Mandarin. In terms of style and register, it is casual and informal, and requires support from discursive or linguistic contexts. For instance, the truncated form huo qi âgeneral depositâ in (6) is normally employed in such compounds as huo qi hu kou
All shortened forms presented in (5) can be used in Cantonese, often with a tint of borrowing. In colloquial Cantonese, however, the preferred clipping strategy targets the second constituent as a whole (âtail-clippingâ), rather than individual syllables in both constituents (âselective clippingâ). As shown in (6) and (7), tail-clipping curtails a longer noun by deleting the entire second constituent. This means that the shortened forms inevitably suffer from the partial loss of lexical content. This explains the necessity of a high degree of support from the discursive context. Note that the part-of-speech of a shortened form always remains intact, and this lends great service to coping with ambiguity which may arise on the surface. For instance, ding kei
Both Southern Min and Cantonese appreciate simplicity of tail-truncation in spite of the potential ambiguity which may result from this type of truncation.31 Southern Min differs from Cantonese, as well as Mandarin, in its tendency to refrain from selective clipping.32 Various examples of tail-clipping in Southern Min are presented below.
In addition to abbreviating quadrisyllabic nouns to disyllabic ones as exemplified in (9), Southern Min can also shorten a verb phrase to a disyllabic expression, as seen in (10). This type of shortening is unknown in Mandarin and Cantonese. Even in Southern Min, it is much more restricted than the clipping of quadrisyllabic nouns. Tail-clipped verb phrases tend to be sensitive to lexical collocation instead of linguistic factors; the clipping becomes unacceptable when the head of the verb phrase is replaced, as shown in (10â).
Finally, the quadrisyllabic nouns in (11) share an identical structure of verb-plus-noun. In colloquial Hokkien, the use of kia kwa ho âto send by registered mailâ in lieu of kia kwa ho iu kia
Returning now to the etymological path from Southern Min phi jun
Linguistic processes in deriving pidgin from Southern Min phi jun or ph(w)ey jun
Own work
This hypothesis also accounts for the variant pronunciations of pidgin âbusinessâ found in self-taught materials of Pidgin English for Cantonese speakers, i.e. bit zin
6 Concluding Remarks
Against the backdrop of the sociohistorical background of Southern Min between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, this chapter has discussed some important contributions made by this less-studied Sinitic language in Sino-European contact, which first took place in Southeast Asia and then in coastal China. Terms such as ang moh
Since the early eighteenth century, Hokkien merchants had played a crucial role in international trade in Canton. Many business leaders were descendants from southern Fujian, and some of them were reported to communicate directly with European merchants in Pidgin English. The Southern Min word phi jun or ph(w)ey jun
From ang moh
Timeline of relevant historical events and linguistic matters
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Caroline Chia and Tom Hoogervorst for organizing the symposium on Rethinking Sinitic Literacy, and providing me with additional literature relevant to this chapter. Their efforts in studying less-known Chinese varieties such as Hokkien are much appreciated. I would also like to thank Ding Hongdi and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. Of course, I alone am responsible for any residual errors.
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In this chapter, all Chinese characters are presented in the traditional form with tone marks omitted in their romanization. Unless noted otherwise, the romanization of Chinese characters is based on Standard Chinese. The Hanyu pinyin
For a general review of the varied orthography of Southern Min, see Ding (2016: 70).
This refers to contemporary Mandarin in modern times and Classical Chinese (
In addition to Amoy, Canton, Fuzhou, Ningbo and Shanghai were all open to trading with Europeans in this period.
See Ng (2015) for a further study of the commercial orientation of Hokkien speakers.
Known as the Ming treasure voyages, seven maritime expeditions were undertaken by Ming Chinaâs treasure fleet between 1405 and 1433, reaching a number of countries in Southeast Asia, Middle East and East Africa (for details, see Levathes 1996).
See Aye (this volume) for an argument that Baba/Bazaar Malay evolved from a Hokkien-Malay pidgin. For a history of ethnic Chinese of Southeast Asia, see Lee (2013).
See âThe Dutch East India Companyâs shipping between the Netherlands and Asia 1595â1795â (retrieved on March 25, 2020):
A map showing distribution of light hair in Europe can be found at the following link (retrieved on August 2, 2018):
Red hair was often portrayed for Dutchmen in Chinese and Japanese paintings in the 1700s and later. For examples (retrieved on March 28, 2020), Zhang Rulinâs work dated to 1738,
For details, see
Reviewers of this chapter noted that the characters
In formal historical Chinese texts such as the Ming Shi
This text appeared in 1601, almost six decades following the incident. For the original source, see
In later editions of the texts, the original characters
For example lwi
Coincidently, the previously mentioned term da ge da
Uchida (2009) provides many examples of Chinese Pidgin English, using Chinese characters to mark pronunciation for reading in Cantonese.
See Perdue (2010) for a vivid description of this system.
This quotation is taken from Van Dyke (2005: 78).
See Li et al. (2005) and Qiu (2017) for further discussions on self-taught materials for learning Chinese Pidgin English. This practice of pidgin learning appears to have been the norm in East Asia, where the writing system of local languages differs significantly from that of European languages. Further examples can be found in Atkinsonâs (1879) exercises of pidgin Japanese for English speakers; Japanese words were represented in English words without any kana or kanji, e.g. nanny for nani
Although Van Dyke (2005) devoted a chapter to detail duties and income of interpreters working in the foreign trade, unfortunately, personal background of these Chinese interpreters was not available.
Sources of detail are Van Dyke (2011) and Cantonese Wikipedia (
The weakening of final nasals has resulted in varying effects in Southern Min dialects. In some dialects, the word-final /n/ was lost with a compensatory nasal vowel on the rhyme (similar to what has happened historically in French). In others, deletion of /n/ is not accompanied by nasalization, but simply by a removal of the coda.
Poankeequaâs hometown was originally under the administration of Quanzhou, but was merged into Zhangzhou in 1958.
For the Chinese vocabulary in Pidgin English, Leland (1876) specified only Mandarin and Cantonese sources, while Airey (1906) mentioned Cantonese and Mandarin as the source for a few items.
For details, see
For example, anaunsu
Tail-truncation is also applicable to loanwords in Cantonese, e.g. inso âinsuranceâ and sitkiu âsecurity guardâ. This kind of truncation is also sometimes found in Japanese, generating disyllabic loanwords based on the initial part of the English original, e.g. kiro
See also Churchman (this volume) on related processes in Penang Hokkien.
The names of