中文: 2008 Archives

It's always interesting when you learn a character for a word you know but didn't know had a character. Especially when it's super-complex. Take, for example, Cantonese zok6 'chisel':

鑿

Looks like 丵 zok6/zhuó 'dense grass' (?) is the phonetic, then there's a mortar (臼), and some beating (殳) with a metal object (金).

Here are some characters that look alike.

戊 wù/mou6 '5th of the 10 Heavenly Stems'. Used as phonetic in 茂 mào/mau6 'luxuriant; profuse'

戌 xū/seot1 '11th of the 12 Earthly Branches'.

戎 róng/jung4 'weapons; military affairs'. Used as phonetic in 絨 'down, velvet'. Interestingly, 'thief' 賊 zéi/caak6 looks like it has this as a component, but the original character had phonetic 則 zé/zak and the weapon radical 戈 gē/gwo1. According to Wenlin, there's an obsolete form 𧵪.

戍 shù/syu3 'defend; garrison'.

Recently I've been listening to these one-minute segments on how to make your Cantonese more correct, called 粵講粵o岩一分鐘.

http://www.rthk.org.hk/elearning/bettercantonese/listenpro.htm

It's basically a big prescriptivist-fest, telling native Cantonese speakers to correct their "lazy sounds" and not merge /n-/ and /l-/, not drop initial /ng-/, etc. There's two "hosts": the guy is 何文匯, whose name is on various Cantonese dictionaries, and the girl is 黃念欣, who I don't know.

For some reason, the guy is really good at making you feel stupid. "People are too lazy to look up the dictionary," he says. Or, "if people would just think logically, they wouldn't pronounce things all wrong." The girl is much more encouraging, but says things like, "if you say things wrong, you'll sound really childish."

Despite the tone, there are some interesting etymological/philological notes in some of the segments, and I did learn some obscure characters which I've seen before but never knew how to read.

Although they can get rather pedantic, in some ways it's kind of reassuring that people are being prescriptivist about Cantonese, because that means people actually care about preserving the language... and that's a luxury not all languages enjoy.