Cantonese reading and Cantonese Writing

• ​媽不在家 Mā bù zàijiā 'Mom's not home'
• Spoken cantonese: ma m4 hai6 uk1 kei2
• Read cantonese: Ma1 bat1 joi6 ga1
• Written unofficial Cantonese 媽唔係屋企
• Pronunciation in Mandarin of these Cantonese characters: mā wú xì wū qǐ

This easy clause is composed by 4 characters: first, the subject, 媽 'mom' (formed by a semantic part 女 'woman' in the left phonetic part 馬 mǎ in the right); second, the negative adverb 不 bù; third, the predicate 在 zài '(to be) at' (formed by the phonetic 才 and a semantic 土 'earth'); and fourth, 家 jiā 'home', formed by a semantic 宀 'roof' and a phonetic 豕. The meaning of the name of this famous alternative cafe in Yau Ma Tei, HK is therefore straightforward in Chinese as in English: “Mom’s not home”.

It is also an easy example to illustrate how Hong Kong people deal with the interesting situation of reading Chinese characters while speaking Cantonese. Chinese characters do not contain straightforward information about their pronunciation, as phonetic systems (like alphabets) would aim to do: there is nothing in 不 that allows you to know that it is pronounced “bù”. Characters often convey some degree of indication, as it is the case of phono-semantic characters like 媽, that contains one part suggesting the semantic field, and another one signaling the pronunciation. The 馬 part indicates that the character is pronounced as 馬 mā, or rather, it indicates the common pronunciation these characters had in Old Chinese. Nevertheless, their pronunciation today may differ because of divergent phonetic evolution. If there is certainly some degree of phonetic indication, it points to characters within the  same writing system, and you still need to know the pronunciation of a considerable number of characters anyway.

When learning to read Chinese, you must then keep in mind at least 2 kinds of information attached to them: the meaning and the pronunciation attached to the characters. Of course, there are other kinds of information, like character composition and stroke order, but these two concepts can be learnt as the mechanics of the general writing system, and not necessarily as inherent to individual characters. But how do Hongkongese people, speakers of Cantonese, read Chinese characters?

If you are speaking Mandarin, you would say “Mom’s not home” like “mā bù zài jiā” (lit.: Mom not is-at home), and would write it ​媽不在家, where each character correspond to one of these four words. But if you are speaking Cantonese, you would express the content “Mom’s not home” in a different way: “ma1 m4 hai6 uk1 kei2”. Note that most words are different: the negative adverb (m4 vs. bù), the predicate (zài vs. hai6), and the noun ‘home’ (jiā vs. uk1 kei2). Indeed, if you want to record this Cantonese pronunciation in writing, you can use Chinese writing to do it, by using both standard Chinese characters taken only by their pronunciation, and new characters, which would derive from outdated old ones, or from modified ones. In this way, if you want to write “Mom’s not home” in Cantonese, you can do it using something like 媽 唔 係 屋企 ‘ma1 m4 hai6 uk1 kei2’. Now imagine a speaker of Mandarin find this text; he would not understand the meaning, and he would pronounce it in a different way: "mā wú xì wū qǐ".

But, what happens when you are speaking Cantonese and want to read 媽不在家 aloud? Instead of “mā bù zài jiā” (mandarin), you would read “Ma1 bat1 joi6 ga1”, which is still different from the way you would actually naturally say it: “ma1 m4 hai6 uk1 kei2”. In this way, when reading, Cantonese speakers are actually not using Cantonese language as they speak it. Instead, they are using an auxiliary language, where Mandarin words are pronounced with their Cantonese equivalents. Auxiliary languages are not really fully developed languages, but just a set of words (an auxiliar lexicon) added to the language, just as other auxiliary languages such as Spanglish. This auxiliary language that allows Cantonese speakers to read Chinese is called 書面語 or "Written language". This auxiliary language is therefore an intermediary step to fill the gap between the written system, built on the Beijing variety of Mandarin, and Cantonese. 

It is also important to set the distinction between reading (Standard) Chinese in Cantonese (書面語), and writing Cantonese. When reading Cantonese, you resort to this auxiliary system that adapts Cantonese to Mandarin Grammar, and assigns to each character a Cantonese pronunciation: Ma1 bat1 joi6 ga1. But when you are a speaker of Cantonese and want to write, you have two ways of doing it: firstly, you use the semantic system you have learnt at school, which is Standard Chinese, where you transcribe the meanings of what you want to write into Chinese characters: 媽不在家. This is the official writing, the shared Chinese written system, the written system of history, prestige and institutions. But you can also choose to use another written system: Cantonese writing, which seems to be alternative, unofficial and identitary, and would therefore be used in graffity, social network short communications, comics, advertisements, etc. Using written Cantonese is therefore an statement on Hong Kong identity. And remember, this written production 媽唔係屋企 would not be understood by non-speakers of Cantonese, because it is a phonetic transcription of the pronunciation of Cantonese language: ma m4 hai6 uk1 kei2.

Therefore, you can count 4 different systems used by Cantonese speakers: 2 spoken (Cantonese language and Cantonese reading of Standard Chinese) and 2 written (Standard Chinese and written Cantonese).

Of course there are speakers of Cantonese who can read and speak Mandarin, but in Hong Kong you can find a great variety of cases: students who learn Chinese at school only as Cantonese, students who study Chinese as Mandarin, and students who doesn’t learn any Chinese at all. Thus, when speakers of Cantonese want to speak Mandarin, they take the written language, and learn the mandarin pronunciation of each character. This means that, for a Cantonese speaker, learning to read Chinese amounts to learning new words that may differ from the words they use to different degrees. 

What does Cantonese writing look like?

Cantonese is not the only Chinese language that has developped a writing system built on standard Chinese. Other languages, like Hokkien (spoken mainly in Fujian and Taiwan) have also their own set of characters with a native pronunciation attached. This languages are not really phonetic, since their units do not make explicit the pronunciation of the characters, although, as we have seen before, there is some degree of phonetic indication. Neverthless, these alternative writing systems allow their users to avoid the use of an intermediary auxiliary language, by assigning the phonetic value of lexemes to each of its characters. Only in this sense it can be said that they are more "phonetic" for them than standard Chinese is.

Cantonese vocabulary 

You will find 4 kinds of words in Cantonese: 

1. Cognates
2. Native words
3. Loanwords
4. Morphological words (aka particles)

The number of Cantonese words that do not exist in Mandarin (i.e.: not cognates) is subject to controversy, but different studies claim it to be from 10 to 35%. Therefore, most of Cantonese words are Chinese cognates, altough, as it happens with the vocabulary of French origin in English, this number is subject to the variable of register: in more formal speech, the number of Mandarin cognates is higher, and in more informal speech, non-cognates are more frequent.

Cognates can generally be easily identified, and are distinguished from mandarin equivalents by regular sound changes. For instance, Mandarin ĭ may correspond to Cantonese ei5, just like nĭ (你) corresponds to Cantonese nei5 / lei5. Also, while native words, with no cognate equivalent in Mandarin, use recycle Chinese characters with some modifications or additions, loanwords are written with existing Chinese characters, with a Cantonese phonetic content, like 巴士 baa¹ si^{2 'bus',} 的士 dik1 si2 'taxi', 多士 do1 si6 'toast' and 士多 si⁶ do¹ 'store'. Finally, morphological items or particles use modified or borrowed characters.

Cantonese Characters

There are different procedures for creating Cantonese characters:

1. Borrowings
2. Marked phonetic loans
3. Derived characters
4. Other methods

Some characters are borrrowed from Standard Chinese, and assigned a new meaning. These characters are most often rarely used in Chinese. For instance, the word for child (子 in Mandarin) is represented in Cantonese by the character 仔, which means"young animal" in Mandarin. Another productive method of character formation are marked phonetic loans. In this case, Standard characters are used only with the phonetic value they have in the auxiliary cantonese for reading, and not with the content they express in Standard Chinese. This use is marked by adding the 'mouth' radical (口) to the left. For instance, the classifier 嗰 gó is taken for its morphological value of classifier, and the verb 'to come', represented 來 (lòih) in Mandarin, becomes 嚟 (lèih) in Cantonese. Some other Cantonese characters are derived from Standard Chinese, with some degree of modification, like 冇 'not have', derived from 有 'to have'. Other methods of character formation include the addition of latin letters, like in the use of o係 for 喺, or in the use of D as 啲, the use of jutping for some particular word, and the use of homophones, like 果 "gó" instead of 嗰.

You can see more examples of this quadruple system in the page of Cantonese 101.