Ebook: Orthographic Change: Yue (Cantonese) Chinese Dialect Characters in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Publisher: The Ohio State University.
Publication date: 2001.
Number of pages: 183.Yue (Cantonese) Chinese dialect characters, which have never been subject to prescriptive reforms, present a fertile ground for studying orthographic change. In the past two hundred years, they have changed greatly and still continue to change, providing an opportunity to track many orthographic changes within a relatively short timeframe.
We find that the changes are part of an ongoing optimization process of refining the written form by changing and replacing characters using more preferred character construction and usage principles, as well as principle-internal changes.
Eight dictionaries and lexicons, ranging from 1856 to 1996, were used to track a hundred and fifteen words. A modified model of character construction and usage principles based on the traditional liushu model was used as a framework for understanding the characters used. This model categorized each character as one of four types: co-signific, semantic loan, phonetic loan, and signific-phonetic. Although contemporary written Cantonese is known for its phonetic loan characters marked with a mouth radical, signific-phonetic characters were found to be the most preferred character construction and usage principle, representing a stage of development that virtually all characters are progressing towards.