Cantonese as old and pure: a critique

[This is a guest post by Robert S. Bauer in response to the video and paper featured in this recent Language Log post:  "Cantonese is both very cool and very old" (4/1/25)]

After I read the paper the first word that came to mind was “Cringeworthy” in regard to the author’s phrase “purer descent”; and the second word

was “Superficial” in regard to the author’s knowledge of Cantonese and Chinese linguistics. For instance, the author who has narrowly focused on just those items that support his claims doesn’t seem to know that the Ancient Chinese tone category of Rusheng/Entering Tone which has disappeared from Mandarin was not a particular tone contour; the distinctive feature of Rusheng was that the monomorphosyllables belonging to it had as their finals or endings the three stop consonants -p, -t , -k, all of which have been retained in Cantonese, as well as in various other Chinese topolects of South China.

Yes, while it is certainly true that the Cantonese lexicon has retained some words from older stages of Chinese, it has also been historically influenced by its contact with the non-Han languages of Tai, Austro-Asiatic, and others in South China. One common example of the Tai substratum in Cantonese is ni1 “this; here” (Bauer 1987a, 1987b, 1996). More recently, over the past 300 years Cantonese has borrowed hundreds of English words which have enriched the Cantonese lexicon, syllabary, and phonological system (Bauer 2003, 2006, 2010; Bauer and Wong 2010; Wong et al. 2009). Just because Cantonese has kept more words from Ancient Chinese than Mandarin has that does not make it “purer”. 

As for the development of Mandarin away from its Ancient Chinese roots (“due to the influence of the northern nomadic peoples”, and so “diluting [its] pure Chinese ancestry”), Mantaro Hashimoto (1986) has referred to this as the “Altaicization of Northern Chinese”. 

Finally, characterizing Cantonese as a “fossil” is both weird and inappropriate, as it implies the language had become extinct and so ceased evolving in the minds and on the tongues of its speakers a long time ago – and of course that is completely untrue.

More comments could be made on this paper but I think I should stop here.

 

Some Relevant Reference

Bauer, Robert S. 1987a. Kadai loanwords in southern Chinese dialects. Transactions of the International Conference of Orientalists in Japan 32:95-111.

__________. 1987a. In Search of Austro-Tai strata in southern Chinese dialects. Computational Analysis of Asian & African Languages 28:53-65.

__________. 1996. Identifying the Tai substratum in Cantonese. Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Languages and Linguistics, Pan-Asiatic Linguistics V:1806-1844. Bangkok: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol University at Salaya, Thailand.

__________. 2003. The Impact of English loanwords on the Cantonese syllabary. In David Bradley, Randy LaPolla, Graham Thurgood, and Boyd Michailovsky, eds. Language Variation: Papers on Variation and Change in the Sinosphere and in the Indosphere in Honour of James A. Matisoff. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Pp. 275-284.

__________. 2006. The Stratification of English loanwords in Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 34.2:172-191.

__________. 2010. The Graphemic representation of English loanwords in Cantonese. In 載張洪年 Cheung Hung-nin Samuel and 張雙慶 Song Hing Chang, 主編 eds., 《歷時演變與語言接觸 — 中國東南方言, Diachronic Change and Language Contact — Dialects in South East China》. Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series Number 24. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press of Hong Kong. Pp. 227-246.

__________. and Cathy S.P. Wong. 2010. New loanword rimes and syllables in Hong Kong Cantonese. 載潘悟云 In Pan Wuyun and 沈鐘偉 Shen Zhongwei, 主編 eds.,《研究之樂, 慶祝王士元先生七十五壽辰學術論文集, The Joy of Research II, A Festschrift in Honor of Professor William S-Y. Wang on His Seventy-fifth Birthday》. 上海: 上海教育出版社 (Shanghai: Shanghai Education Publishing). Pp. 1-24. ISBN 978-7-5444-2627-5.

Hashimoto Mantaro. 1986. The Altaicization of Northern Chinese. In John F. McCoy and Timothy Light, eds., Contributions to Sino-Tibetan Studies. E. J. Brill. Pp. 76–97.

Wong, Cathy S.P., Robert S. Bauer, Zoe W.M. Lam. 2009. The Integration of English loanwords in Hong Kong Cantonese. In Mark Alves and Paul Sidwell, eds., Journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, Volume 1. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. Pp. 251-265.