Written Cantonese

Written Cantonese is the written form of Cantonese, the most complete written form of Chinese after that for Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese. Written Chinese was originally developed for Classical Chinese, and was the main literary language of China until the 19th century. Written vernacular Chinese first appeared in the 17th century and a written form of Mandarin became standard throughout China in the early 20th century. While the Mandarin form can in principle be read and spoken word for word in other Chinese varieties, its intelligibility to non-Mandarin speakers is poor to incomprehensible because of differences in idioms, grammar and usage. Modern Cantonese speakers have therefore developed their own written script, sometimes creating new characters for words that either do not exist or have been lost in standard Chinese.
With the advent of the computer and standardization of character sets specifically for Cantonese, many printed materials in predominantly Cantonese-speaking areas of the world are written to cater to their population with these written Cantonese characters.
History.
Before the 20th century, the standard written language of China was Classical Chinese, which has grammar and vocabulary based on the Chinese used in ancient China, Old Chinese. However, while this written standard remained essentially static for over two thousand years, the actual spoken language diverged further and further away. Some writings based on local vernacular speech did exist but these were rare. In the early 20th century, Chinese reformers like Hu Shih saw the need for language reform and championed the development of a vernacular that allowed modern Chinese to write the language the same way they speak. The vernacular language movement took hold, and the written language was standardised as vernacular Chinese. Mandarin was chosen as the basis for the new standard.
The standardisation and adoption of written Mandarin pre-empted the development and standardisation of vernaculars based on other varieties of Chinese. No matter which dialect one spoke, one still wrote in standardised Mandarin for everyday writing. However, Cantonese is unique amongst the non-Mandarin varieties in having a widely used written form. Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong used to be a British colony isolated from mainland China before 1997, so most HK citizens do not speak Mandarin. Written Cantonese was developed as a means of informal communication. Still, Cantonese speakers must use standard written Chinese, or even literary Chinese, in most formal written communications, since written Cantonese may be unintelligible to speakers of other varieties of Chinese.
Historically, written Cantonese has been used in Hong Kong for legal proceedings in order to write down the exact spoken testimony of a witness, instead of paraphrasing spoken Cantonese into standard written Chinese. However, its popularity and usage has been rising in the last two decades, the late Wong Jim being one of the pioneers of its use as an effective written language. Written Cantonese has become quite popular in certain tabloids, online chat rooms, instant messaging, and even social networking websites; this would be even more evident since the rise of localism in Hong Kong from the 2010s, where the articles written by those localist media are written in Cantonese. Although most foreign movies and TV shows are subtitled in Standard Chinese, some, such as "The Simpsons", are subtitled using written Cantonese. Newspapers have the news section written in Standard Chinese, but they may have editorials or columns that contain Cantonese discourses, and Cantonese characters are increasing in popularity on advertisements and billboards.
It has been stated that written Cantonese remains limited outside Hong Kong, including other Cantonese-speaking areas in Guangdong Province. However, colloquial Cantonese advertisements are sometimes seen in Guangdong, suggesting that written Cantonese is widely understood and is regarded favourably, at least in some contexts.
Some sources will use only colloquial Cantonese forms, resulting in text similar to natural speech. However, it is more common to use a mixture of colloquial forms and standard Chinese forms, some of which are alien to natural speech. Thus the resulting "hybrid" text lies on a continuum between two norms: standard Chinese and colloquial Cantonese as spoken.
Cantonese characters.
Early sources.
A good source for well documented written Cantonese words can be found in the scripts for Cantonese opera. "Readings in Cantonese colloquial: being selections from books in the Cantonese vernacular with free and literal translations of the Chinese character and romanized spelling" (1894) by James Dyer Ball has a bibliography of printed works available in Cantonese characters in the last decade of the nineteenth century. A few libraries have collections of so-called "wooden fish books" written in Cantonese characters. Facsimiles and plot precis of a few of these have been published in Wolfram Eberhard's "Cantonese Ballads." See also "Cantonese love-songs, translated with introduction and notes by Cecil Clementi" (1904) or a newer translation of these by Peter T. Morris in "Cantonese love songs : an English translation of Jiu Ji-yung's Cantonese songs of the early 19th century" (1992). Cantonese character versions of the Bible, Pilgrims Progress, and Peep of Day, as well as simple catechisms, were published by mission presses. The special Cantonese characters used in all of these were not standardized and show wide variation.
Characters today.
Written Cantonese contains many characters not used in standard written Chinese in order to transcribe words not present in the standard lexicon, and for some words from Old Chinese when their original forms have been forgotten. Despite attempts by the government of Hong Kong in the 1990s to standardize this character set, culminating in the release of the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS) for use in electronic communication, there is still significant disagreement about which characters are "correct" in written Cantonese, as many of the Cantonese words existed as descendants of Old Chinese words, but are being replaced by some new invented Cantonese words.
Vocabulary.
General estimates of vocabulary differences between Cantonese and Mandarin range from 30 to 50 percent. Donald B. Snow, the author of "Cantonese as Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular", wrote that "It is difficult to quantify precisely how different" the two vocabularies are. Snow wrote that the different vocabulary systems are the main difference between written Mandarin and written Cantonese. Ouyang Shan made a corpus-based estimate concluding that one third of the lexical items used in regular Cantonese speech do not exist in Mandarin, but that between the formal registers the differences were smaller. He analyzed a radio news broadcast and concluded that of its lexical items, 10.6% were distinctly Cantonese. Here are examples of differing lexical items in a sentence:
The two Chinese sentences are grammatically identical, using an A-not-A question to ask "Is it theirs?" (referring to an aforementioned object). Though the characters correspond 1:1, the actual glyphs used are all different.
Cognates.
There are certain words that share a common root with standard written Chinese words. However, because they have diverged in pronunciation, tone, and/or meaning, they are often written using a different character. One example is the doublet lòih (standard) and lèih (Cantonese), meaning "to come." Both share the same meaning and usage, but because the colloquial pronunciation differs from the literary pronunciation, they are represented using two different characters. Some people argue that representing the colloquial pronunciation with a different (and often extremely complex) character is superfluous, and would encourage using the same character for both forms since they are cognates (see Derived characters below).
Native words.
Some Cantonese words have no equivalents in Mandarin, though equivalents may exist in classical or other varieties of Chinese. Cantonese writers have from time to time reinvented or borrowed a new character if they are not aware of the original one. For example, some suggest that the common word (leng), meaning "pretty" in Cantonese but also "looking into the mirror" in Mandarin, is in fact the character .
Today those characters can mainly be found in ancient rime dictionaries such as "Guangyun". Some scholars have made some "archaeological" efforts to find out what the "original characters" are. Often, however, these efforts are of little use to the modern Cantonese writer, since the characters so discovered are not available in the standard character sets provided to computer users, and many have fallen out of usage.
In Southeast Asia, Cantonese people may adopt local Malay words into their daily speech, such as using the term 鐳 to mean money rather than 錢 , which would be used in Hong Kong.
Particles.
Cantonese particles may be added to the end of a sentence or suffixed to verbs to indicate aspect. There are many such particles; here are a few.
Loanwords.
Some Cantonese loanwords are written in existing Chinese characters.
Cantonese character formation.
Cantonese characters, as with regular Chinese characters, are formed in one of several ways:
Borrowings.
Some characters already exist in standard Chinese, but are simply reborrowed into Cantonese with new meanings. Most of these tend to be archaic or rarely used characters. An example is the character 子, which means "child". The Cantonese word for child is represented by 仔(jai), which has the original meaning of "young animal".
Compound formation.
The majority of characters used in Standard Chinese are phono-semantic compounds - characters formed by placing two radicals, one hinting as its meaning and ons hinting its pronunciation. Written Cantonese continues this practice via putting the 'mouth' radical () next to a character pronounced similarly that indicates its pronunciation. As an example, the character uses the mouth radical with a , which means 'down', but the meaning has no relation to the meaning of . (An exception is "mē", which is not pronounced like ("yèuhng", sheep) but was chosen to represent the sound sheep make.) The characters which are commonly used in Cantonese writing include:
There is evidence that the mouth radical in such characters can, over time, be replaced by a different one. For instance, (lām, "bud"), written with the determinative ("cover"), is instead written in older dictionaries as , with the mouth radical.
Derived characters.
Other common characters are unique to Cantonese or are different from their Mandarin usage, including: etc. The characters which are commonly used in Cantonese writing include:
The words represented by these characters are sometimes cognates with pre-existing Chinese words. However, their colloquial Cantonese pronunciations have diverged from formal Cantonese pronunciations. For example, ("without") is normally pronounced "mòuh" in literature. In spoken Cantonese, ("móuh") has the same usage, meaning, and pronunciation as , except for tone. represents the spoken Cantonese form of the word "without", while represents the word used in Classical Chinese and Mandarin. However, is still used in some instances in spoken Cantonese, such as ("no matter what happens"). Another example is the doublet , which means "come". (lòih) is used in literature; (lèih) is the spoken Cantonese form.
Workarounds.
Though most Cantonese words can be found in the current encoding system, input workarounds are commonly used both by those unfamiliar with them, and by those whose input methods do not allow for easy input (similar to how some Russian speakers might write in the Latin script if their computing device lacks the ability to input Cyrillic). Some Cantonese writers use simple romanization (e.g., use D as 啲), symbols (add a Latin letter "o" in front of another Chinese character; e.g., 㗎 is defined in Unicode but will not display if not installed on the device in use, hence the proxy o架 is often used), homophones (e.g., use 果 as 嗰), and Chinese characters which have different meanings in Mandarin (e.g., 乜, 係, 俾; etc.) For example,