[
    {
        "id": 205205,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1966",
        "page_number": 161,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n155\n\ninto 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.\n\nOn 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.\n\nThere 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.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
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    {
        "id": 206695,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1972",
        "page_number": 243,
        "title": "RAS-1972",
        "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS \n\n237\n\nthe path of English speakers learning Mandarin. A pronunciation problem exists because most English speakers do just what Huang directs them to do, i.e., make voiced-voiceless contrasts for these initial sounds instead of the voiceless aspirate-inaspirate contrasts made by the native speakers. If such mistakes are understood by the native speaker it is only because they are adapting to the pronunciation errors and not because the errors are unimportant. Such adaptation is of course automatic and easy if this is the only mistake a beginner makes. However, any beginning student can be expected to add mispronunciations of tone and vowel to the problem of the initials and it is clear that the pronunciation errors can easily multiply beyond the ability of the native speaker to compensate for them. In the long run every area of mispronunciation is equally important and the language instructor cannot afford to let students reinforce any weaknesses.*\n\nIt is ironic that many older works were more accurate than Huang in this respect. Wade-Giles p', t', etc. represent a clear attempt to demonstrate that these contrasts were NOT voiced versus voiceless. Huang misses the point altogether when (pp. xx-xxi) he says \"voiceless plosives should be written as P, T, K, and the voiced ones simply as B, D, G.\" The Yale system uses such a symbolization but obviously the symbols themselves are totally unimportant, purely a matter of agreement among the users. The critical point is how these symbols are related to pronunciation in articulatory terms. Here Huang misdirects the student, while the textbooks using the Yale romanization write b, d, g, but clearly describe them as representing voiceless consonants.\n\nHuang continues to mislead his readers by equating English and Chinese sounds when they are not equal. On page xxvi he equates Mandarin yi with the English vowel in see. This is phonetically inaccurate and touches on another common area of mispronunciation in Chinese. The English vowel as in see normally has an off-glide [-iy] with a shift in position of articulation. The Chinese vowel in yi has no offglide and, after the initial consonant or semiconsonant, is pronounced as a pure vowel [-i]. A similar situation exists\n\n*Y. R. Chao suggests (Mandarin Primer, p. 21) that, failing to master voiceless initial stops and affricates, the student may \"as a last resort\" pronounce them as their voiced English counterparts. He then notes, \"The use of voiced consonants.... is not absolutely correct and will give a strong foreign accent.\"",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 206696,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1972",
        "page_number": 244,
        "title": "RAS-1972",
        "content_text": "238\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nwith Mandarin /-u/ which Huang incorrectly compares to English /-u/ as in fool. Again this is phonetically misleading since the English vowel has an offglide [-uw] and the Chinese vowel [-u] does not.\n\nIn several places Huang compares Chinese r- to English r-. This may work in syllable initial position for many speakers, but Chinese speakers differ and English dialects are so divergent in treatment of this consonant that guidance based on cross-language comparisons must be used with great care. Explanations on pages xxix, 10, 11 and elsewhere should certainly distinguish English »r-« in syllable initial position as contrasted with other positions. Page 54 could well have included the information that the pronunciation of /r-/ varies in North China from something like English r- to something with much more friction approaching a French j- (hence the Wade-Giles j-).\n\nIt is not enough to argue as some authors do that these phonetic differences are slight and unimportant. The whole purpose behind a book like this is to give someone all the useable information about the fine points of Mandarin pronunciation. Misinformation, especially erroneous comparisons to English sounds, leave the student exactly where he would be with no help at all, that is, substituting the closest available English sound for the correct Mandarin sound. We do not need special instruction for that type of language learning, but we do need specific guidance in avoiding such problems. This book fails us here so we are still waiting for someone to publish the guide to Mandarin pronunciation. As of this date the best help continues to be found in the brief introductions to texts like Beginning Chinese by John DeFrancis, Speak Mandarin by Henry C. Fenn and M. Gardner Tewksbury, and Mandarin Primer by Y. R. Chao. All these texts give articulatory comparisons in terms of American English pronunciation but add corrective instructions.\n\nCornell University, 1972.\n\nJOHN MCCOY",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1972.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gm80qf99h",
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    }
]