A NEW LOOK AT CANTONESE EXPLETIVES
113
early-Archaic, any Chinese character could be used for a dozen others, in any part of speech, and thus in any of a hundred meanings. This would be an exaggeration, as he intended, but it does bring out the point I made earlier, that any speaker of Chinese has to build up his self-scanning "Censor" mechanism, to guide him away from saying what he does not mean to say, unhelped by the grammatical apparatus which in the agglutinative languages guide him through many a syntactical maze.
—
When a child picks up his own language from his parents or playmates and in Hong Kong, remember, a properly brought up child should pick up both English and Cantonese this way
he does so not by learning a lot of grammatical rules, but by echoing what he hears, fitting in other words by trial and error, and so establishing a network of patterns according to which he will come to arrange the pattern also of his thinking. Later in life, perhaps, he will be taught formal grammar: and this way stop him using some patterns he has been using, but will probably not cause him to learn any new patterns he didn't know before. Hence the difficulty so many of us find when learning a strange language we can perceive intellectually the new grammatical patterns, but we are prevented, blocked, inhibited from adopting them as our own, far less conceive fresh patterns in conformity with the new rules.
We must become again as little children, and learn by repetition the way the new language is spoken. Use no pattern that isn't in our new learning; and so gradually guide our thoughts along the new paths. To enable you to do which, I have in Appendix II set out 92 verbal patterns, in paradigm form, using the word ZROU (to do or to be) as the basic word. Any one-syllable become-word (whether a verb as we understand it, an adjective — e.g. XRUNQ "red, which when "conjugated" means to become red, or blush a noun used as a verb, even some prepositions like words meaning "to" or "with", or interjections) can be substituted for the ZROU of this paradigm. To be really complete I should have added a second paradigm with a two-syllable root, to show the way some particles are infixed between the two syllables, while others require the first of the two syllables to be duplicated,
90 做
91 1
A NEW LOOK AT CANTONESE EXPLETIVES
113
early-Archaic, any Chinese character could be used for a dozen others, in any part of speech, and thus in any of a hundred meanings. This would be an exaggeration, as he intended, but it does bring out the point I made earlier, that any speaker of Chinese has to build up his self-scanning "Censor" mechanism, to guide him away from saying what he does not mean to say, unhelped by the grammatical apparatus which in the agglutinative languages guide him through many a syntactical maze.
—
When a child picks up his own language from his parents or playmates and in Hong Kong, remember, a properly brought up child should pick up both English and Cantonese this way
he does so not by learning a lot of grammatical rules, but by echoing what he hears, fitting in other words by trial and error, and so establishing a network of patterns according to which he will come to arrange the pattern also of his thinking. Later in life, perhaps, he will be taught formal grammar: and this way stop him using some patterns he has been using, but will probably not cause him to learn any new patterns he didn't know before. Hence the difficulty so many of us find when learning a strange language we can perceive intellectually the new grammatical patterns, but we are prevented, blocked, inhibited from adopting them as our own, far less conceive fresh patterns in conformity with the new rules.
We must become again as little children, and learn by repeti- tion the way the new language is spoken. Use no pattern that isn't in our new learning; and so gradually guide our thoughts along the new paths. To enable you to do which, I have in Appendix II set out 92 verbal patterns, in paradigm form, using the word ZROU (to do or to be) as the basic word. Any one- syllable become-word (whether a verb as we understand it, an adjective — e.g. XRUNQ"1 red, which when "conjugated" means to become red, or blush a noun used as a verb, even some prepositions like words meaning "to" or "with", or interjections) can be substituted for the ZROU of this paradigm. To be really complete I should have added a second paradigm with a two- syllable root, to show the way some particles are infixed between the two syllables, while others require the first of the two syllables to be duplicated,
90 做
91 1
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