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Charles Belov writes:

My understanding was that Hong Kong newspapers, newscasts, and popular Cantonese songs use literary Chinese exclusively while Hong Kong star magazines and Cantonese hip-hop (e.g., LMF, Softhard) use colloquial Cantonese exclusively. But today as I was walking along, an old Beyond song, 俾面派对, was earworming me and it suddenly hit me that, unlike most Cantonese songs, and like Cantonese hip-hop, which it isn't, it includes colloquial Cantonese, specifically 唔 and 佢 (and, as it turns out, "D").

Now that I am home and can listen to the song, it also contains literary 不 and 的, both of which have colloquial Cantonese equivalents. (There may be other examples of both literary and colloquial in this song but this is the extent of my Cantonese.) I'm puzzled, especially about 不 (literary "not") and 唔 (colloquial "not") appearing in the same song. My expectation would have been that any particular Cantonese work, unless it's including direct quotes, would either just use literary Chinese or just use colloquial Cantonese, but not mix the two. Could you please shed some light as to what is going on here? Is this common and just something I haven't noticed before because my Chinese is so minimal, or is this a unicorn?

Music video with lyrics here.

My impression of colloquial Cantonese is quite different from that of Charles, i.e., that there is no hard and fast line between pure topolectal Cantonese (jyut6 jyu5 粵語) and standard Chinese (zung1 man4*2/4 中文), but that they exist on a continuum of more or less of one and the other (see the book by Donald Snow listed in the "Selected readings" below), and that in practice there is no such thing as "pure" written Cantonese.

To confirm my impression, I asked Bob Bauer, author of ABC Cantonese-English Comprehensive Dictionary, what he thought of the language in the video.  His reply:

Your LangLog reader seems to assume there should be consistency in writing styles of Hong Kong Chinese – on the one hand, the text is written completely in standard Chinese, or on the other, everything is written in colloquial Cantonese – that is, without mixing together different linguistic styles and varieties in one text.

But this is not how writers write in Hong Kong. What I observe every day is “messy mishmash”, the lack of consistency.

Yesterday one of the headlines on the front page of Apple Daily was: 疫捲五GYM房 jik6 gyun2 ng5 zim1 fong4/2 ‘the (corona)virus spreads to five gyms’. This word GYM房 zim1 fong4/2 ‘a place where a person uses specially-designed equipment to achieve and maintain physical fitness’ has become a typical Hong Kong Cantonese loanword from English that can be mixed with standard Chinese on the front page of Hong Kong’s most popular newspaper.

At any rate, for the moment I don’t have an elegant, or even adequate theory to explain this mixing phenomenon in Hong Kong written Chinese – other than to simply characterize the Hong Kong Chinese writer as having only one brain in which is stored “the Chinese language” as one broad, amorphous category, and not as individually-defined, discretely-segregated categories of standard Chinese, colloquial Cantonese, Hong Kong Chinese, Hong Kong English loanwords, mainland Chinese, etc.

Don Snow, an authority on written Cantonese, explained the situation as follows:

While it might seem reasonable to assume that texts written in Cantonese would faithfully and consistently follow the norms of the spoken language, it is actually very common for texts to be written in a mix of Cantonese and other varieties of Chinese. Sometimes it is easy to describe what the "game rules" for such mixed-code texts are; for example, in some texts the narration is all in Mandarin/Standard Chinese and only direct quotes are written in Cantonese. However, it is also not at all unusual for texts to mix the two varieties in ways that make it hard to explain why a Cantonese or Mandarin word is used where it is. So, with regard to the Beyond song, I think the best way to explain what is going on is to say that the lyrics are mainly in Mandarin (which is normal for Cantonese pop songs) but that it is also peppered with Cantonese words to give it a clear Cantonese accent.

Of course, Cantonese speakers would probably not perceive this as being a mix of Mandarin and Cantonese, but rather a style in which the base language is a somewhat literary form of written Chinese – of the type taught in Hong Kong schools – and the spicing comes from colloquial words, the kind a Hong Kong school teacher would tell students not to use when writing.

Another colleague who has been long resident in Hong Kong replied thus:

Yes, your reader seems confused about the nature of modern Cantonese. "Normal" Canto just mixes everything. It's true that newspaper articles and student essays will tend to use the "standard" writing system and phrasing shared by the various Chinese languages, so usually they're easily intelligible to someone from Shanghai or Taipei. But there's often a bit of Canto flavour mixed in — phrasing that's a bit different. In everyday speech, though, anything goes. I can't imagine any popular music or speech not using 唔 and 佢. But I also wouldn't think of 不 as "literary," per se. It would be interesting for someone knowledgeable (not me!) to look into when exactly 不 is used and when 唔. For example, 不如 is used all the time colloquially for suggestions; I don't think anyone would say 唔如.

Yes, apparently "俾面派对" really is a "giving-face party." Wong Ka-kui 黃家駒 didn't like being forced to attend all these industry social events to get ahead in the music business. He just wanted to play rock and roll!

Charles also sent along a music video from Taiwan that mixes things up quite a bit. 

I ran across a Mandarin music video from Taiwan that uses some apparently Taiwanese cultural terms written using Latin characters (not to mention that the group's name is Fun4) as well as some conventions which seem strange to me.

0:30 High (???)

1:39 kuso and Orz (I was able to find these from a search; kuso (said as a word in the song) originally stood for unintentionally funny bad video games and has expanded to mean anything funny, while orz (spelled out in the song) represents a kneeling person emoticon.

1:46 written but not sung tiny 我的 in the middle of a line

2:21-3:01 they are inserting small circles and, in a couple cases, a long spacing line; I'm guessing this might be a stylistic choice but my nearly non-existent Chinese is unable to make a guess as to their purpose.

Although the group is clearly singing in decent Mandarin, they feel free to play around with all sorts of other linguistic spices. I will not go into the Taiwan song in the depth and detail we expended on the Hong Kong song, but will just mention two terms that stand out:

Kuso is a term used in East Asia for the internet culture that generally includes all types of camp and parody. In Japanese, kuso (糞,くそ) means fuck, shit, damn, and bullshit, and is often said as an interjection. It is also used to describe outrageous matters and objects of poor quality. This definition of kuso was brought into Taiwan around 2000 by young people who frequently visited Japanese websites and quickly became an internet phenomenon, spreading to Taiwan and Hong Kong and subsequently to the rest of China.

(source)

Orz is a posture emoticon representing a kneeling, bowing, or comically fallen over person.  The O represents the head, the r represents the torso and arm, and the z represents legs.

(source, source)

It would be a good exercise for Language Log readers to ponder why this amorphousness exists for Cantonese, Taiwanese, and other Sinitic topolects and what its implications are for their future.

 

Selected readings

• ABC Cantonese-English Comprehensive Dictionary (Honolulu:  University of Hawaii Press, 2020).
• Donald B. Snow, Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003).  Appendix 1 of this remarkable book gives 14 Cantonese texts, each of which Snow carefully analyzes for the degree to which it adheres to the norms of spoken Cantonese rather than of written Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM). The 14 texts, which cover a wide range of genres, date from around the 17th century to the contemporary period. It is striking that the percentages of overtly marked Cantonese (and Snow is referring here not just to special Cantonese characters) in these 14 texts range from only 3% to 36%: 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 20, 23, 23, 23, 28, 32, 36, for an average of 17%.
• Stephen Matthews and Virginia Yip, Cantonese, A Comprehensive Grammar (London:  Routledge, 2011 [2nd edition]), and other works on Cantonese by the authors.
• Robert S. Bauer and Paul K. Benedict, Modern Cantonese phonology (Berlin:  De Gruyter Mouton, 1997).
• Kwan-hin Cheung and Robert S. Bauer, "The Representation of Cantonese with Chinese Characters",  Journal of Chinese linguistics: Monograph series (18); Project on Linguistic Analysis, University of California, 2002.
• "Writing Taiwanese with Romanization" (10/7/20)
• Polyscriptal Taiwanese" (7/24/10)
• "The geo-, socio-, ethno-, and politicolinguistics of Taiwan" (7/24/18)
• "Writing Sinitic languages with phonetic scripts" (5/20/16)
• Christine Louise Lin, "The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the Advocacy of Local Autonomy", Sino-Platonic Papers, 92 (January, 1999), xiii + 136 (free pdf)
• Alvin Lin, "Writing Taiwanese: The Development of Modern Written Taiwanese", Sino-Platonic Papers, 89 (January, 1999), 4 + 41 + 4 (free pdf)

 

[Thanks to Pui Ling Tang]

 

March 15, 2021 @ 3:45 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Colloquial, Language and music, Mixed lanuage, Topolects

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