60
J. MCCOY
With these reservations I would go ahead to describe KS as differing only slightly from SC and containing no phonological or grammatical elements identifiable as non-Chinese. The KS lexicon is essentially Cantonese with the superstructure of technical terms which are available to, but seldom used by, land dwellers plus a few terms worthy of further research which seem at first glance to be outside these patterns. Some examples of this latter category are /mai6/ 'to disembark' and /khau2/ 'to dwell'.
The next question would then be whether we can say something more positive about KS forms in terms of a possible point of origin for the ancestors of the present speakers. When I heard the tradition about Tung Kun as a possible source I checked the KS material with Yuan (1960) and with my own somewhat different data on Tung Kun phonology. There are interesting similarities but also a few marked differences. I have only a small amount of data on the rural Pun Yu dialects but what little I have seen suggests that this area would be good to check for an identification. With speculation of this sort we begin to get on fairly thin ice. In the first place, the Boat People at Kau Sai seem to have been there for more than two centuries, long enough for the development of a few distinctive sound changes of their own to cloud the issue. And secondly, we are still terribly short of the really detailed dialect area coverage that would be necessary to tie up KS with a particular point elsewhere in the Cantonese speaking regions. Works such as those by Wang Li (1932; 1949-50a,b), Chao (1947, 1951a,b), and Yuan (1960) have made great inroads into the problem but the regions of minor dialect variation are so unbelievably numerous in Kwangtung Province that there seems little hope for a detailed picture to emerge for many years to come. The recent interest which Peking has taken in such matters, principally in their efforts to foster Mandarin as a standard language, has produced a great deal of material on dialect and subdialect throughout China; Yuan (1960) published as part of this general effort and probably more is yet to come. Still, there is plenty to do and no linguist in the field will feel himself crowded. One of the points of this paper is that even within the limits of the Crown Colony of Hong Kong there exists the same problem in microcosm and much time could well be spent sorting out the local varieties.