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J. MCCOY
Although linguistics, as the study of one aspect of man and his works, is properly a field within anthropology, it is quite possible both in theory and practice for the linguist and the anthropologist to spend a lifetime in study without actually meeting each other. The linguist can devote himself to languages and language theory and operate in almost total isolation from man except in so far as that man is a speech-producing machine. Obviously this is an overstatement since speech is certainly a culture-related phenomenon, but the linguist's contact with his informant's daily life may be minimal even though it can be less productive if this is so. On the other hand, the anthropologist concerns himself with the sum total of the life of a specific group and language is only one factor in this total. In such a case the particular language may become highly important as a tool but languages in general, even those of contiguous areas, may be neglected in the interests of devoting more time and effort to a different set of problems. As in many other fields today, increased specialization has tended to produce training in depth rather than breadth and the inter-disciplinary study is then left to be done by collaboration or by the new specialist, the man working to overlap portions of two fields in an effort to synthesize the related parts of each. In the two fields of concern here this new specialist is already in evidence with the obvious designation of anthropological linguist, and with at least one technical journal devoted to his particular problems.
This paper is an exercise in anthropological linguistics in the sense that it is designed to gather linguistic data on the Boat People of Kau Sai and prepare this information for insertion into the larger picture of this group and their life. The results will be seen to be to some extent negative in that they tell us more about what the people are not rather than what they are, and they can only tentatively be used to give a location of the area from which these people migrated to Hong Kong. Still, this is largely a mark of the shortcomings in our knowledge of Kwangtung Province dialects and their distributions and not a comment on this use of linguistic research.
Also, it would be a great help if the Kau Sai Boat People had more knowledge or tradition about their earlier residence. Apparently they have been in Kau Sai well beyond the memory