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J. MCCOY
items or portions of the whole. The question of borrowing versus innovation presents problems in all these fields and can best be handled in terms of a totality of features, either cultural or linguistic. When language data are analysed, foreign names and loan words may be an important factor, but they represent only a small fraction of the total system of phonology, grammar, and lexicon.3
From this point of view, it might be considered important to start any study of a Chinese dialect with work on every aspect of the spoken form, but in fact, there are reasons why this is not always necessary. There is a relatively high degree of syntactic similarity among all the Chinese dialects, and between related subdialects, the syntactic differences are negligible. My working assumption is that Kau Sai syntax is similar to that of Standard Cantonese and that the most significant differences between the two subdialects would be found in the phonology. During the course of my informant contacts, nothing developed to suggest that this approach was invalid.
My assumption about Kau Sai lexicon was that the bulk of the vocabulary could be directly correlated with Standard Cantonese cognates, but that there would be a number of words and phrases which could be exceptions to this rule. These latter items would be principally terms connected with the fishing occupation and shipboard existence of the people. This assumption also turned out to be true, although my study of the lexicon was admittedly only a statistical sampling. It should be noted that technical and specialized vocabulary of this sort frequently leads outsiders to feel that a language is more foreign than it actually is, since a relatively small number of these words in the total lexicon may in fact be high-frequency words and appear often in normal speech. If enough of these words are unknown to an outsider, he may have trouble following a conversation which is merely a jargon or patois of his own dialect. If the problem is further compounded by the addition of some degree of phonological difference, as might be found in a regional subdialect, the untrained ear will frequently exaggerate variations which may be minor in terms of linguistic relationships.