[ { "id": 205204, "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": 160, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "154\n\nBOOK REVIEWS\n\nsheer volume alone makes this dictionary unique and should tell the prospective user that he will likely find here many definitions which do not appear elsewhere or which would be found only after a time-consuming search of numerous other sources.\n\nThe arrangement is alphabetical in romanized Cantonese. With only minor modifications the romanization is the same as that used in Meyer and Wempe, The Student's Cantonese-English Dictionary, and in a number of textbooks on colloquial Cantonese ranging from Father O'Melia's First Year Cantonese to S. L. Wong's Cantonese Conversation Grammar (which latter text duplicates all the romanized material in the Barnett-Chao system as well). This makes a handy tie-in with training materials for the beginning student although there are some concomitant problems which I will mention below. Being in romanized form this book should be especially welcome to those who want to study the dialect without necessarily learning characters in the process. For those who need them, characters are available in the back of the book, and it is even possible to work from material in characters through the keys in the appendices which are cross-referenced to the romanized entries and definitions. However, according to the title the chief target is not the reader but the speaker, the person who hears an expression and wants to look it up in the quickest and most convenient way. In this form the dictionary fills a long need for a large reference work on the dialect in romanized form.\n\nThe title is, however, somewhat misleading since the book is obviously and admittedly designed for the reader as well as the speaker. This is seen principally in the fact that there was no attempt to stick exclusively to colloquial or conversational material. A great number of words and phrases from the classical and written language are included and many of these cannot be described as allusions or quotations commonly heard in the spoken language.\n\nAs might be expected from a book this size with such a large number of entries, each entry receives only a minimum of attention and the simplest possible definition usually suffices. There is little or nothing in the way of elaboration on the meanings and no examples of usage. This may occasionally leave the user with an additional research job and it certainly won't afford any feel for context in case the student wonders how to put an item back", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205814, "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-1969", "page_number": 120, "title": "RAS-1969", "content_text": "114\n\nH. G. H. NELSON\n\n(in an attempt to use the physical structures as a basis for a random sampling frame), and reached the conclusion that in the conditions of New Territories villages, it is strictly undefinable. The local \"village houses\" are built in terraced rows: each \"house\" consists of a single \"room\", which, although generally divided by a partition into living and sleeping quarters, is regarded as the living accommodation proper to one married couple and their unmarried children. It is very rare for an old and widowed mother to share the same \"house\" as her son and daughter-in-law: I have not come across a single instance of more than one married couple, however closely related, sharing the same \"house\". The correspondence between room, house, and household is by no means exact: not only may one household (defined as a group of kin sharing a common budget and a single stove) be spread over a number of \"houses\", but where one household is occupying two adjacent \"houses\", an interconnecting door may be opened between them, turning them, to all intents and purposes, into a single \"house\" of two \"rooms\". It might almost indeed be more logical to regard each unit in a terrace as a \"room\", and define \"house\" as that combination of \"rooms\" which is occupied by a single household, even when the \"rooms\" are located in more than one terrace; but Chinese usage does not support this — each unit is called uk, never fong.\n\nThe Hong Kong Government surveyors who numbered all agricultural and building lots in the early years of this century evidently came up against a similar problem of definition; and there are inconsistencies in the system of numbering they adopted. Where two adjacent units were owned (and occupied?) by one man, they are numbered together as one (double-sized) house-lot. There is one row in Sheung Tsuen, however, where the living quarters of each house are separated from their kitchens by the narrow lane that gives access to them: it is clear from the pattern of ownership in 1905 (when the Block Crown Lease was drawn up), and from the way these structures have been passed down the generations since then, that each kitchen is linked with a single\n\n* I use the Meyer-Wempe Romanisation of Cantonese terms throughout.\n\n† Sheung Tsuen (1) in the Pak Heung (^#) where Mr. Nelson carried out his research. See p. 171 of A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories (Hong Kong Government Printer, n.d, but 1960), Ed.\n\nPage 120\n\nPage 121", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1969.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9g553n20d", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208085, "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-1977", "page_number": 124, "title": "RAS-1977", "content_text": "108\n\nYUEN-FONG WOON\n\nlineage of T'oh-fuk, the Kwaan of Lung-tsai She, whose ancestors had migrated from T'oh-fuk, came under its protective umbrella. Some of them had even succeeded in evading their head taxes through connections with the official leaders there. Thus, it was not surprising that the Kwaan in Lung-tsai She were eager to keep their separate identity by maintaining residential segregation from the Wong and the Tang while attending the annual Spring and Autumn Rites at the Kwong-ue Ancestral Hall in Che-hom. They only co-operated with the Wong and the Tang in projects of immediate concern such as irrigation and defence, since they were numerically a minority in Ts'ung-long Heung.\n\nThe study of the centrifugal forces of the headquarters of higher-order and dispersed lineages on multi-surname villages in South China has been largely neglected by scholars in the field. G. W. Skinner, in his article \"Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China\" Journal of Asian Studies, XXIV (1964-5 pp. 36-40) asserts that once segments of a lineage had moved away from the parent settlement and were attending different standard market towns, they would lose their connections with one another. The case of Lung-tsai She discussed in this paper tends to refute this argument. Despite geographical separation, the Kwaan in this village was economically, administratively and ritually still an integral part of the Kwaan lineage of T'oh-fuk until at least 1949.\n\nIn Taiwan and other parts of China, where lineages were weaker, members of multi-surname villages not only had more intra-village ties, they also had more contact with and reliance on affinal and maternal kin outside the village. Intra-village quarrels were as likely to be along class lines as along lineage lines. Village temples had much more educational, economic, administrative as well as relief functions than were the case in multi-surname villages in South China.\n\nNOTES\n\n1 Hoi-p'ing County is one hundred and four miles (290 li) southwest of Canton. Heung (Mandarin: Hsiang) was an administrative unit above the Ts'uen (: village) but below the District. There were one hundred and three Heung in Hoi-p'ing, each administered by a Heung Office since 1930. All names in this paper are in Cantonese, following the Meyer-Wempe system of transliteration.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1977.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/np198x23n", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 208713, "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-1979", "page_number": 170, "title": "RAS-1979", "content_text": "THE MARYKNOLL MISSION, HONG KONG 1941-46\n\n143\n\nrice at a very low price in order to help the people and giving away bread and canned goods in order to insure that they would have enough to eat. On communications he noted that there were no buses in the city at all. The Japanese had sent them all to Japan early in the war. He got from Stanley to the city and back again by hitch-hiking in army jeeps and trucks. At the same time he applied to the military for a telephone and electricity connections. He noted that business was at a complete standstill. The two American banks had no business at all since they were not allowed to receive U.S. currency from the States. The exchange rate was 8 to 1 when he arrived but by the end of November it was down to HK$4.50. In December the railway between Canton and Hong Kong was reopened and people began flocking to Hong Kong; however, due to the poor condition of the track the trip was taking eight hours instead of the normal three. In normal times most people would have made the trip by boat, but in the course of the war more than half of the Canton boats had been sunk by mines, usually with the loss of all aboard. Nevertheless, as order was gradually restored in the Colony, more and more Chinese who had fled during the Japanese occupation returned and the Colony witnessed a spectacular recovery. People were returning at the rate of one hundred thousand a month, and the population, which had been reduced to about 600,000 in August 1945, rose by the end of 1947 to an estimated 1,800,000.\n\nWhen Father Meyer first returned to the Stanley House he was overjoyed to find that his priceless manuscript and 200 copies of the famous \"Meyer-Wempe Cantonese-English Dictionary\" had not been destroyed. In his correspondence to the Superior General about this he learned that the dictionary had been used by the U.S. Navy during the war years, and the Navy had given Maryknoll 50 copies of the printing they had made for the use of their personnel. In the same correspondence the Superior General announced that former South China missioners Fathers Keelan, Sprinkle, Youker, Weber, Cunneen, O'Neill, and Brother Michael Hogan were on the high seas returning to their mission posts.\n\nJust before Christmas Father Tennien hitched a plane ride from Hong Kong to Kunming in Yunnan Province, the city where every Maryknoller stayed before his thrilling flight \"over the hump\" into India during the war years. At one time there were so many", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1979.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/2801w5938", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209033, "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-1980", "page_number": 195, "title": "RAS-1980", "content_text": "NOTES AND QUERIES\n\n163\n\nand again in 1921, to share its territory with the Maryknollers. It was to do so yet again when, in 1931, a large part of scenic north central Kwangsi centered on the capital city, Kweilin, was transferred to them.\n\nThe three books make fascinating reading, partly because these were not ordinary men, and because they worked in China at a time of change, but also because the scene is set in South China among the Hakka and Cantonese of the districts adjacent to Hong Kong where, too, the Order established its mission house and language school in 1934. Indeed, Monsignor Bernard F. Meyer was, with Father Theodore F. Wempe, the author of The Student's Cantonese-English Dictionary, first published in 1935 and still going strong.\n\nTo end this note of appreciation, I shall quote from a letter sent by one of our members, Mr. W. J. Howard, following publication of the account of Maryknoll Mission, Hong Kong, 1941-1946 in the last Journal.\n\nHong Kong, May 1982\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nMR. W. J. HOWARD'S LETTER TO THE HON. LIBRARIAN, dated 18 January 1982\n\nDear Sir,\n\nJOURNAL OF THE HK BRANCH OF THE ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY VOL. 19, 1979 (published 1981)\n\nPlease send me five (5) copies of the above Journal addressed to me at Causeway Bay PO Box 30704. I will remit the total cost together with postal charge as soon as I receive your debit advice.\n\nI require so many extra copies of this particular Journal because I wish to send them to my friends. I consider the articles on the Maryknoll Mission, Hong Kong 1941-1946 by Rev. James Smith and Rev. William Downs, M.M., shed about the most accurate and unbiased record of Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation. Some of my relatives were interned in Stanley during the war and I was interned in Shamshuipo P.O.W. camp and later in Japan. I\n\nPage 195\n\nPage 196", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1980.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/kh04md207", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209508, "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-1982", "page_number": 165, "title": "RAS-1982", "content_text": "Shatou near Shumchun. Mr. Tang can speak SC, but his pronunciation is recognizable as non-native. In this, he differs from his father, who in his lifetime knew only the local dialect, and from his son, who is more fluent in SC than in KHW; even more so from his grandson, a child of 3 who, although he is being raised in KHW and understands the dialect, is acquiring SC.\n\nThe data consist primarily of the reading pronunciations of about 430 Chinese characters, for the most part those listed in the first pages of the Fangyan Diaocha Zibiao, a questionnaire commonly used in surveys on Chinese dialects. The characters in these lists are chosen so as to allow a quick characterization of the main phonological features of a Chinese dialect. Additional reading pronunciations were collected, as well as a few lexical items and samples of spoken dialect. The phonetic transcriptions were checked out for consistency with the informant, especially with respect to finals and tones.\n\nIt might be argued that reading pronunciations serve the purpose of reading aloud texts in classical Chinese, and do not necessarily coincide with the colloquial. However, the spoken forms within the data, and a short exposure to the dialect outside working sessions convinced me that the same phonological system underlies the reading pronunciations and the colloquial. In a few cases, a difference was found between reading and spoken forms. Such cases seem restricted to a phonologically well-defined category of words which show similar double readings in SC. There are undoubtedly a number of theoretical readings within the data, as a reading was obtained for each character, however unlikely to occur in spoken KHW. Still, no effort was made to find out which readings were theoretical, as phonology was the only concern of this survey.\n\nIn the following pages, the Meyer-Wempe (MW) system of romanisation will be used for transcribing SC sounds, and a system close to the International Phonetic Alphabet will be used for transcribing KHW sounds. An asterisk precedes reconstructed forms.\n\nPage 165\n\nPage 166", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1982.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mk61z420p", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 209972, "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-1983", "page_number": 231, "title": "RAS-1983", "content_text": "209\n\nCHUE MO PENG (#Ł), A FEVER REPORTED FROM VILLAGES IN THE HONG KONG REGION, AND ITS CURE, TOGETHER WITH OTHER VILLAGE REMEDIES FOR EXCESS HEAT\n\nJAMES HAYES\n\nThis note deals with chue mō pêng (Meyer-Wempe Cantonese but variously romanized below) the subject of a disease often complained of by local villagers, in my experience.\n\nEitel's Dictionary* mentions it under mo; ‘Chu mo ping or chut chu teng, a common disease in South China. It begins with high fever and after vigourously rubbing the chest, bristles an inch long appear through the skin, after their removal the fever goes down' (vol. 1, p. 619).\n\nA similar account, under \"Chu Mo Teng\", appears at pp. 171-2 of S.H. Peplow's Hong Kong Around and About, published in 1930 by the Commercial Press, Hong Kong. The author was a Land Bailiff with the District Office South, New Territories of Hong Kong and would have been well acquainted with village life.\n\n\"A common disease in South China. The translation is: chu—a pig. Mo—hair. Teng—nail. A disease where hairs, like pig's bristles or nails issue forth. It is purely a native fever.\"\n\nBy chance, I came across a dramatic instance of this disease in my early years as a government officer when engaged in compensating and rehousing villagers who were to be displaced for the Shek Pik reservoir on Lantau Island, 1957-60. The village people attributed a major epidemic that caused many deaths about the year 1936 to this disease (100 persons were said to have died, though this is probably an exaggeration).\n\n* A Chinese-English Dictionary in the Cantonese Dialect by Dr. Ernest John Eitel, revised and enlarged by Immanuel Gottlieb Genähr of the Rhenish Missionary Society (Hong Kong, Kelly and Walsh, 2 vols., 1911 and 1912).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1983.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/j9607p61v", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210379, "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-1984", "page_number": 350, "title": "RAS-1984", "content_text": "329\n\nstudent who can find a generous sponsor for complementary studies of those rural areas which lie outside Dr. Hayes's purview: the other Peng Chau (in Mirs Bay or Dapeng-wan), Tap Mun, Sha Tau Kok, Tai Po, Yuen Long and their hinterlands. Even within Hong Kong's 400 square miles can be seen the kind of variations which Ouyang Hsiu described (in his preface to the Hsin Wu-tai Shih) as: it is a strength of Chinese society that such healthy variability can exist. Time is short, because when I was last there in 1982, the opening up of roads had already begun to erode village life, as it did in Tsuen Wan, Lantao and New Kowloon,\n\n+\n\n-\n\nDr. Hayes is a true Cadet, in the tradition of Cecil Clementi, Walter Schofield, Stephen Balfour and John Barrow, and his work puts even them in the shade. But oh! oh! that romanization! He says disarmingly in the Foreword \"I confess that romanization has been a problem.\" No shame in that: Chinese — whichever you wish of the 3,000 languages, all known as Chinese — does not lend itself to phonetic writing, and the Cadmean alphabet, while no doubt adequate for the Western Semitic language for which it was devised, was not really suited to Latin and is hopeless for English (though it does not do too badly for Finnish and Welsh) — how much less for Chinese? But of all the inadequate answers to this problem, why choose the obsolete Wade-Giles without its vital apostrophes and tone-numerals, too for what Western academics obstinately call “Mandarin”; and Meyer-Wempe for Cantonese? The latter, with omitted or misprinted diacritical marks, of which I found many (and have sent Dr. Hayes a list) is gibberish. Besides, being based on West River dialects, which differ considerably from the Upper Punyu which, after the eclipse of Sai Kwan wa from 1905 onward, became the standard speech of Canton, Hong Kong and overseas Cantonese (except those from the 5 districts known as Sze Yap), Meyer & Wempe's handy little dictionary has serious shortcomings. What a pity an updated Eitel never appeared!\n\nNothing will ever persuade me that Cantonese, Hakka and Hokkien place names should be written in letters indicating a pronunciation which no local would understand. (I suppose it must be a matter of politics, with which no scholar should soil his hands). Just you try getting a boat to “Shayuyung”! (The place is", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1984.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/5h73wh572", "rank": 0 } ]