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Finally, for English sounds with no corresponding Chinese sound, diacritics are placed alongside the Chinese characters, based on the methods employed by Qian Long in his Manchu dictionaries of the Chinese minority languages.
The resulting transcription is as accurate and consistent as the International Phonetic Alphabet. Added to this, the translations of Chinese words and phrases are precise and accurate. The American source of Tong's English clearly shows through.
Much of the material is in the form of extended dialogues covering domestic and trade matters: thus the reader is in the position of being a "fly on the wall" during trade negotiations for teas and fabrics in the mid nineteenth century. This in itself is a valuable historical and linguistic resource. But in addition, obviously added as an afterthought, texts in small Chinese characters are included in whatever space is free on each page of dialogues. These texts are the Pidgin English equivalents.
Now you can see what a goldmine this source is: we have extensive recordings of Pidgin dialogues set down by a rigorous and talented linguist, together with their colloquial English and Cantonese equivalents.
The Chinese Characters used to record the pidgin are not those used to transcribe the standard English. They are taken from a very limited stock of colloquial Cantonese characters: about one hundred are used altogether, as compared with well over five hundred characters and variants used in the main text. This reduced character stock may be the ones used in the original "Devils' Talk" pamphlets, which had attained the status of convention (which, as we shall illustrate they still do).
This is the source which we shall use for our general description of China Coast Pidgin.
We think it was the demise of employment of Chinese servants among European families which has made pidgin die out in Hong Kong. The Pacific war and the influx of Filipino immigrant labour have done for Pidgin what the mammals did for the dinosaurs. Reading the
125
Finally, for English sounds with no corresponding Chinese sound, diacritics are placed alongside the Chinese characters, based on the methods employed by Qian Long in his Manchu dictionaries of the Chinese minority languages.
The resulting transcription is as accurate and consistent as the International Phonetic Alphabet, Added to this, the translations of Chinese words and phrases are precise and accurate. The American source of Tong's English clearly shows through.
Much of the material is in the form of extended dialogues covering domestic and trade matters: thus the reader is in the position of being a "fly on the wall” during trade negotiations for teas and fabrics in the mid nineteenth century, This in itself is a valuable historical and linguistic resource. But in addition, obviously added as an afterthought, texts in small Chinese characters are included in whatever space is free on each page of dialogues. These texts are the Pidgin English equivalents.
Now you can see what a goldmine this source is: we have extensive recordings of Pidgin dialogues set down by a rigorous and talented linguist, together with their colloquial English and Cantonese equivalents.
The Chinese Characters used to record the pidgin are not those used to transcribe the standard English, They are taken from a very limited stock of colloquial Cantonese characters: about one hundred are used altogether, as compared with well over five hundred characters and variants used in the main text. This reduced character stock may be the ones used in the original "Devils' Talk" pamphlets, which had attained the status of convention (which, as we shall illustrate they still do).
This is the source which we shall use for our general description of China Coast Pidgin.
We think it was the demise of employment of Chinese servants among European families which has made pidgin die out in Hong Kong. The Pacific war and the influx of Philipino immigrant labour have done for Pidgin what the mammals did for the dinosaurs. Reading the
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