BOOK REVIEWS
155
into a sentence of his own. Of course this is not a criticism since such was the design of the compilers, but I offer it as a clarification of the nature of the work. This book is in fact a gigantic word list or vocabulary and as such it presents a maximum amount of material in a minimum of space. Any attempt to enlarge the definitions and to add examples would probably result in a multi-volume work selling at a considerably higher price.
On the whole this dictionary should prove a useful asset to anyone working from spoken Cantonese to English. My overall impression is favorable but the book raises in my mind several general questions concerning Cantonese lexicography which are worth discussing here. First, it seems to me high time that more dictionaries and grammars began to reflect the sound changes which have gained ascendancy in Standard Cantonese. I here refer specifically to the distinctions such as those between ch- and ts-, ch'- and ts'-, s- and sh-, -am and -om, sometimes -ek and -ik, etc. which are maintained in the orthography of this (and many other) dictionaries and grammars but which are not part of Standard Cantonese as spoken by the majority of the population of Canton and Hong Kong. Yuen Ren Chao (Cantonese Primer, 1947, pp. 18-9) notes that these distinctions are made by most of the "foreign writers on Cantonese" but that they are only a nuisance to the "native teacher from Canton, since the pure dialect of Canton does not make such distinctions". Nevertheless, Chao himself continues to use them on the grounds that they will help the student who later moves on to study Mandarin or certain other Cantonese subdialects.
There are dialects which keep these distinctions but Standard Cantonese is not one of them. Hong Kong has plenty of evidence of this orthography in many place names, but this shows up only in the English transliterations and a local born Chinese who reflects these spellings in his speech would be hard to find. To preserve these distinctions in a dictionary or grammar of Standard Cantonese is simply adding unnecessary time to the student's learning task and creating a point of potential confusion which would be very simple to avoid. For instance, if a student of Cantonese hears an unknown form which sounds to him like sik, he may find that he would have to look under the three dictionary entries of sik, sek, and shik in order to be certain that he had covered all the possibilities.
BOOK REVIEWS
155
into a sentence of his own. Of course this is not a criticism since such was the design of the compilers, but I offer it as a clarification of the nature of the work. This book is in fact a gigantic word list or vocabulary and as such it presents a maximum amount of material in a minimum of space. Any attempt to enlarge the definitions and to add axamples would probably result in a multi-volume work selling at a considerably higher price.
On the whole this dictionary should prove a useful asset to anyone working from spoken Cantonese to English. My overall impression is favorable but the book raises in my mind several general questions concerning Cantonese lexicography which are worth discussing here. First, it seems to me high time that more dictionaries and grammars began to reflect the sound changes which have gained ascendancy in Standard Cantonese. I here refer specifically to the distinctions such as those between ch‐ and ts-, ch'- and ts'-, 5- and sh-, -am and -om, sometimes -ek and -ik, etc. which are maintained in the orthography of this (and many other) dictionaries and grammars but which are not part of Standard Cantonese as spoken by the majority of the population of Canton and Hong Kong. Yuen Ren Chao (Cantonese Primer, 1947, pp. 18-9) notes that these distinctions are made by most of the "foreign writers on Cantonese" but that they are only a nuisance to the "native teacher from Canton, since the pure dialect of Canton does not make such distinctions". Nevertheless, Chao himself continues to use them on the grounds that they will help the student who later moves on to study Mandarin or certain other Cantonese subdialects.
There are dialects which keep these distinctions but Standard Cantonese is not one of them. Hong Kong has plenty of evidence of this orthography in many place names, but this shows up only in the English transliterations and a local born Chinese who reflects these spellings in his speech would be hard to find. To preserve these distinctions in a dictionary or grammar of Standard Cantonese is simply adding unnecessary time to the student's learning task and creating a point of potential confusion which would be very simple to avoid. For instance, if a student of Cantonese hears an unknown form which sound to him like sik, he may find that he would have to look under the three dictionary entries of sik, sek, and shik in order to be certain that he had covered all the possibilities.
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