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LAURENT SAGART
I believe the 'dialect of the walled villages' is the same language that K.M.A. Barnett calls 'Namtau A a sub-dialect of Tung Kwun'. He writes: 'In the most prevalent Punti dialect, the Namtau dialect spoken in the N.W. plains by the oldest-established clans, there is confusion between final -n and -ng; e.g. the surname Man is pronounced Mang, Chan is pronounced Chang, while Ching is pronounced Chan, and so on' (p. 156). With reference to the place name Tai To Yan ‘Razor cliff', he writes (p. 137): 'The Nam Tau dialect pronounces this Tai Tau Yang'. These pronunciations correspond very well to KHW, except that 'Ching is pronounced Chan': one would expect a 'Chang'; but this is a very minor difference. Another sub-dialect of Tung Kwun, Sheklung, was described in two articles by J. D. Ball and C. J. Saunders, and shares many features with KHW.
A comparison of the phonologies of the 'dialect of the walled villages' and the dialect of the boat people of Kau Sai shows that, although they do not stand particularly close to one another, these two Cantonese dialects of the NT have features in common which are not shared by SC: the merger of SC -ui and -vi, the merger of SC -un/t and -an/t, and the raising of /o/ to /u/ in certain environments. This is hardly surprising, since Kau Sai and KHW, two long-established dialects in the New Territories area, have been in contact for centuries. In contrast, nothing in the phonology of KHW suggests a link with Jiangxi or indeed with any other group of dialects.
Scholars have taken the view that way t'au wa represents a ‘mixed Hakka-Punti language”. Yet from the point of view of phonology it is difficult to think of positive developments that would link up KHW (but not SC) and Hakka. On the lexical level, there are idioms that KHW shares with Hakka, but not with SC. For instance, the words for 'ear' and 'calf of leg' are cognates in KHW and Sung Him Tong, a Hakka village near Fanling 粉嶺10:
KHW Sung Him Tong Hakka 'ear' ji1 kak3 ngi3 kit5 'calf of leg' kök3 nong2 tu3 kiok5 lang2 tu3Page 180
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