Is there a difference between Cantonese and Cantonese?

Cantonese, commonly known as Cantonese, English is Canton, and local people are vernacular, so it should be called Cantonese. It is a dialect with complex language phenomena, more archaic features and characters, and less internal differences among the seven major Chinese dialects. Distributed in most parts of Guangdong and southeastern Guangxi, represented by Cantonese. Cantonese can be said to be the earliest "Mandarin" in China.

To discuss the origin of Cantonese, we must first find out where Cantonese comes from. Some people think that Cantonese originated from the ancient Baiyue language in Lingnan, which is incorrect. Cantonese does retain some elements of Baiyue language in ancient Lingnan, but its main source is elegant words in ancient Central Plains.

Yayan is based on the primitive Chinese used by the Chinese tribal alliance headed by the Yellow Emperor. In the Zhou Dynasty, it developed into the national language of the Central Plains, which can be said to be the earliest "Mandarin" in China. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the dialects of various vassal countries were different, and the official exchanges, scholars' lectures and sacrificial activities all used elegance. Confucius once said, "Words are elegant, poems and books are ritual." The husbands and wives of fugitives from the former six countries were recruited to be "squatters" in Lingnan. These occupants "come from all corners of the country" and they have to communicate with each other in an elegant way. However, because the Lao people settled in the fields alone, their language only passed through the village and did not spread throughout Lingnan. Until the establishment of Nanyue State in Zhao Tuo, they also adopted the costumes and customs of Baiyue indigenous people and spoke Baiyue indigenous language. It can be seen that Yayan did not go through Lingnan. Only a small number of "Yayan Island" appeared. Elegant words spread in Lingnan, starting from the Western Han Dynasty after Pingnan Yueguo. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty set up a "toe secretariat" to supervise the county, while in the Eastern Han Dynasty, the toe secretariat was withdrawn and Jiaozhou was set up. The first step secretariat and Jiaozhou are both Han regimes, and official exchanges must be elegant. Toe secretariat and JIAOZHOU office are located in Guangxin most of the time. Yazi first appeared in Guangxin, which was also an important commercial center in the early Lingnan period. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty sent envoys from Xuwen and Hepu to open up the Maritime Silk Road, and bought back overseas treasures such as pearls, glazed pottery and stones with silk, porcelain and miscellaneous jade, and then imported optical messages through the two trade channels of Nanliujiang-Beiliujiang and Jianjiang-Nanjiang, and then through Hejiang-Xiaoxiao.

Guangxin was also the early cultural center of Lingnan. During the Eastern Han Dynasty, a large number of scholars took this as a position to carry out cultural activities, set up museums and teach students and apprentices. Among them, the most famous scholars are Chen Yuan and Shi Xie. Known as "Linghai Confucianism", Chen Yuan returned to Guangxin to run a school in his later years and became one of the pioneers of Lingnan culture. Shang Yang served as the satrap of Jiaozhi County for more than 40 years. He was once the "satrap of seven counties" and visited the Central Plains many times. These literati took teaching as their profession, and when spreading Chinese culture in the Central Plains, they used elegant characters with Chinese characters as recording symbols. While learning China culture and Chinese characters, the aborigines also learned elegant characters. These indigenous languages are very different, and they can't communicate with each other, and there is no writing. Therefore, in addition to communicating with the Han people, the communication between tribes also uses elegance. In this way, Yayan has become the help of various indigenous tribes. Just like during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, various vassal states used elegance and vulgarity in their communication, forming a bilingual system, using their own mother tongue in their own tribes and elegance and vulgarity in their foreign communication. At the same time, some factors in ancient Baiyue language were also absorbed by the language of Han immigrants, thus gradually forming a dialect of Chinese-Cantonese.

At the beginning of its formation, Cantonese has no obvious difference from Chinese in the Central Plains. After the Jin Dynasty, "five wild flowers" appeared, followed by more than 200 years of north-south division. The nomadic people in the north entered the Central Plains, which had a great influence on the culture and language there. Since the Zhou Dynasty, they have gradually disappeared as the same language as the people. During this period, Lingnan maintained a relatively stable situation, which evolved from the Central Plains. "In the Middle Ages, many dialects had three tones: the initial differentiation of affricate, the confluence of nasal vowels, the weakening and falling of affricate vowels, the return of voiced sounds and the entering tone, which were all rejected by Cantonese dialects." Therefore, Yayan has disappeared in today's North and Central Plains, but many of its factors remain in today's Cantonese.

The stop sound in Fengchuan dialect: a living fossil of early Cantonese

Cantonese retains a lot of elegant factors in contemporary times, which can be confirmed by the comparison between Cantonese and Qieyun. Qieyun is the earliest phonological work in China, which was written in the early Sui Dynasty and recorded the phonology of scholars in the Southern Dynasties, that is, the elegant sounds in the later period. By comparing Qieyun with the seven major dialects of Chinese today, we can see that Cantonese is the most complete phonology. Due to the influence of nomadic language, consonants and vowels are generally separated in northern dialects of China. So people in this field simply don't know what Rusheng is. Although other Chinese dialects retain some entering tones, they are not complete. Cantonese abandons the changing law of "three tones of entering tone", so it retains the whole set of entering tone in ancient times, which corresponds neatly to nasal vowels.

In the areas where Cantonese is formed, the factors of quaint phonology are more clearly preserved. There is a set of voiced initials in the phonology of Qieyun, which has disappeared in most Chinese dialects and in Cantonese today. However, this set of voiced initials is completely preserved in closed Cantonese. What is more noteworthy is that in closed Cantonese, it is not only pronounced as a voiced initial in rhyme cutting. In addition, the words "bang", "Duan" and "Jian" in Qieyun also have voiced consonants. As we know, "voiced consonants are clear" is a law of the evolution of Chinese initials. According to this law, the more developed voiced consonants are, the older they are. The voiced consonants in Fengkai Cantonese are more developed than those in Qieyun, which shows that this is indeed the case.

Traffic area

Cantonese is popular in Guangdong and Guangxi, with Guangzhou dialect as the center and a population of about 40 million. The accessible areas are as follows:

There are 47 counties and cities in Guangdong Province that are pure Cantonese or mainly Cantonese, accounting for more than 1/3 of the whole province. Namely Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhaoqing, Jiangmen, Shenzhen, Maoming, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Nanhai, Panyu, Dongguan, Shunde, Longmen, Fogang, Zengcheng, Conghua, hua county, Qingyuan, Lianxian, Yangshan, Lianshan, Huaiji, Guangning, Sihui, Sanshui, Gaoyao, Yunfu, Gaoming, Xinxing and Gaoyao. Cantonese is also spoken in Huizhou, Shaoguan, Zhanjiang, Haifeng, Boluo, Huiyang, Huidong, Renhua, Lechang, Yingde, Baoan, Dianbai, Suixi, Haikang, Xuwen and Lianjiang 16 counties and cities.

There are 24 counties and cities in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region that speak Cantonese, namely Nanning, Hengxian, Guigang, Guiping, Pingnan, tengxian, Wuzhou, Yulin, Beiliu, Rongxian, Bobai, Luchuan, Fangcheng, Qinzhou, Hepu, Pubei, Lingshan, Beihai, Cangwu, Cenxi, Zhaoping, Mengshan, Hezhou and Zhongshan.

Cantonese is divided into different categories according to local regions:

Guangdong dialect film (standard Guangdong)

Guangzhou dialect: Guangzhou dialect, also known as "Guangzhou dialect", is a typical representative of Cantonese, but Guangfu dialect itself is constantly changing and developing. Before 1949, the words used in Guangzhou dialect were quaint and less influenced by the northern dialect.

Divided into the following categories:

Nanfanshun dialect: Guangzhou itself is composed of Panyu and a part of the South China Sea, so Guangzhou dialect can actually be regarded as a special case of Nanfanshun dialect. The dialects of Guangzhou, Panyu and Nanhai are close, but the pronunciation of many words in Shunde is different from other places, such as "concave" pronounced [NAP] instead of [lap]; Eating is not eating, but eating.

Luoguang dialect: distributed in Zhaoqing, Sihui, Luoding, Guangning, Huaiji, Fengkai, Deqing, Yunan, Yangshan, Lianxian and Lianshan, with Zhaoqing dialect as the representative.

Although all the phonetics and vocabulary are close to Guangzhou dialect, they still retain the characteristics of early ancient sayings in intonation. For example, the high and low key of Yin Ping tone is obviously different from that of Gao Pingtiao, and the tone is like the stress of the tone (the tone value is similar to the fourth tone of Mandarin). There are almost no common lazy sounds in Guangdong dialect. For example, all words starting with non-I vowels are prefixed with initials [ng], Ke [ngo 1] and short. [n], [l] The sounds are different

(Modern) Hong Kong dialect: Before 1949, Hong Kong dialect had a strong Cantonese-Hakka mixed accent (that is, Hakka dialect was influenced by the tone and vocabulary of Guangfu dialect, and vice versa). Jintian dialect is representative, but this accent only exists in the elderly in Hong Kong today.

After 1949, a large number of lazy sounds began to appear in Hong Kong dialect, especially the nasal sounds (that is, n/l is indistinguishable) and the awkward sounds of W disappeared. The new generation of young people generally pronounce "you [nei]" and "I" [NGO] as [lei] and [o], and mispronounce "guo" [gwok]. For them, the pronunciation of n/l is not much different, and in most cases, confusing the two will not bring serious communication obstacles. Therefore, when they come to Hong Kong to learn this new dialect, they often give up what is difficult and take what is easy, thus diluting some indistinguishable pronunciation differences. This is also called "theory of human nature", which has also appeared in the evolution of desktop Mandarin and American English.

However, before the 1980s, the mass media still tried their best to avoid lazy voices in radio and TV programs. Up to today, there are still many linguists in Hong Kong who criticize lazy pronunciation and put forward the activity of "correcting pronunciation", but lazy pronunciation seems to have become the feature of Cantonese in Hong Kong. In most mass media and singers' performances, lazy voices are regarded as "fashionable" and "fashionable" accents. But on the whole, Hong Kong dialect is still very close to Guangzhou dialect.

English is more popular in Hong Kong. In the past, Hong Kong usually came into contact with foreign new things before the mainland. The lower classes who didn't know English before can spell everyday English words in Cantonese. Therefore, English loanwords in Cantonese in Hong Kong are very common. For example, the "coiled pipe worker" and "Wen" foreman, the brakes are called brakes, the bearings are called beer, the strawberries are called strawberries, and so on. Many old people also call stamps stamps, insurance a swallow comb, and so on. These real terms may make foreign countries

Toishane dialect:

Siyi dialect refers to the dialects of Xinhui, Enping, Kaiping and Taishan, among which Taishan dialect is the representative. Half of Zhuhai people speak Siyi dialect (especially in Doumen area), while other areas use Xiangshan dialect. There are great differences in pronunciation between Siyi dialect and Guangzhou dialect.

Movies in Levin dialect:

Levin dialect is mainly distributed in Yangjiang and Leizhou Peninsula.

Southern Guangxi dialect (Cancerese):

It is mainly distributed in the southeast of Guangxi, with the county in the northeast of Guangxi as the dividing line to Nanning and Pingxiang in the south of Guangxi. Cantonese is dominant in the southeast of the line, accounting for almost one-third of the total area of Guangxi. Mandarin is mainly spoken in the northwest of the line. Cantonese in Guangxi is similar to Cantonese, and they can understand each other. However, in the early days, some residents in Cantonese moved to ethnic minority areas and absorbed the language elements of ethnic minorities, thus forming dialects that are quite different from Cantonese, such as Goulou Cantonese, mainly including Yongxun Cantonese, Wuzhou Cantonese, Goulou Cantonese and Qinlian Cantonese.

The classification is as follows:

Yongxun Cantonese (Nanning dialect): Close to Wuzhou Cantonese. Mainly popular in towns with convenient transportation on both sides of Yongzhou and Zhou Xun, such as Nanning, Yongning, Chongzuo, Ningming, Hengxian, pingnan county and parts of Liuzhou. Nanning is the representative point.

Wuzhou Cantonese (Wuzhou dialect): Very close to Guangzhou dialect. It is mainly distributed in Wuzhou City, Daan, Danzhu, Wulin Town, Guiping County, Cangwu County, Jintian Town of Hexian County (now Hezhou) and its vicinity. The internal differences are very small. As a representative of Wuzhou dialect, there are 265,438 initials and 46 finals in the phonetic system.

Goulou Cantonese (Yulin dialect): mainly distributed in Yulin, Guigang (except Pingnan County and Guiping County) 13 counties and cities. The phonology is complex, with 65,438+00 tones. There are voiced initials b and d, which are rare in other dialects of Cantonese. Many words are lost at the end of rhyme, such as [lar] pronounced twice. And the vocabulary is also very distinctive.

Qinlian Cantonese (Qinlian dialect): It is basically the same as Yongxun Cantonese, with little internal difference. Mainly distributed in Qinzhou City, Hepu County (formerly known as Lianzhou), Pubei County, Fangcheng County, Lingshan and Beihai City.

Wuchuan dialect: distributed in Wuchuan City and Zhanjiang City, Guangdong Province.

Danjia dialect: Danjia calls itself Cantonese on the water. Egg dialect, also known as water dialect, is widely used in houses, ships, Guangdong and Guangxi.

Cantonese is divided into nine tones: Yin Ping, Yin Shang, Yin Qu, Yang Ping, Yang Shang, Yang Qu, Yin Ru, Zhong Ru and Yang Ru.

Nine tones represent themselves: the history of poetry, market, color and canned food.

So, it makes no difference.