A NEW LOOK AT CANTONESE EXPLETIVES
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LRIT-ZRYNV (biographies) as you can, for they are in my judgment the essence of SHIHMRAAR. The longest is that of SHOW CREONN3 (Vol. 69) but don't miss the important LREE-SHIH" (Vol. 87).
Then, just as I advised my Chinese friends to jump from Milton to Shaw, going back afterwards to Scott and Thackeray, so I advise my English friends seeking the essence of Cantonese to jump (a far longer jump) from SHIHMRAAR-CHINN30 to LREONO KAECHIW32 and, using the same method (reading the original aloud with a Cantonese teacher, sentence by sentence, and making him paraphrase it) tackle at least three chapters of his JARM-BHENO-SHAT essays. And observe, please, how much more he has to alter in his paraphrase of BRAAKWRAAV-MRANN34, even though LREONQ12 himself was a Cantonese, than he had to either with the late ZHAW philosopher or the late XON historian,
After this you will be able, perhaps even without a teacher, to read the SEOE-WUUR-ZRYN3 and the SHAAMM-GWOK-ZI JIRNJRI3, after which if you still haven't got it there is no hope for you.
What, then will you have “got”? And can I in a few sentences of analysis save you a little pain and trouble?
Well, I think you will have found for yourselves that although modern Cantonese, like late Archaic Chinese, Historical Chinese and LREONQ's32 BRAAKWRAAV-MRANN34, does not possess parts of speech distinctively labelled as they are in Latin & Greek, it does have them in the more fluid sense that English has. Not usually by their form, but by their position, and the way they combine with certain particles and not with others, we may identify words as (if we like to call them so) nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and the rest. Except that a new class of words, often described as “particles" but which I prefer to call "expletives"
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31A 32 梁啟超 33 飲冰室
34 #X. It is a great pity that journalists, and even scholars, will persist in calling this “Mandarin", a totally different dialect for which the
Chinese is
35周
✯.
16**
37水浒傅 38 三陆志演義