 Hello everyone. My name is George, or Chong-Ken Kwok. I'm very happy to be here to give this presentation, Introduction to Cantonese. In this slide, I'm going to give you a roadmap to outline what I'm going to cover in this presentation. The presentation will first give an introduction to the speakers of the language and some discussion on the sociolinguistic situations of Cantonese as well. Then we will talk about the structure of the language, especially the morphology and the phonology. Of course, every language is complex, and therefore we can't take a look at every single one of the experts. Therefore, I'm only going to cover some of the main or most distinctive features, especially the tone in the phonological aspects of Cantonese, the consonants, and some syllables. And in terms of morphology, I'm going to cover the adverbial structures and some aspects marker in verbs as well. If it is something you are not very familiar with, it just means some adverbs in Cantonese and some tense markers in Cantonese to signify whether a sentence or an action happened in the past or in the future or in present. Okay, as you can see on the map, Cantonese is the most widely known and influential variety of Chinese other than Mandarin in China. And Cantonese is spoken primarily in the southern China province of Guangdong, as you can see in the red area on the China map on the top of the slide at the top of the slide. And Cantonese is not spoken by everyone in Guangdong province. And in a circle at the bottom picture of the slide, you can see the pink area, the people in the pink area are the people who spoke, who speak Cantonese as their native language. And you can see a yellow circle at the bottom part of the picture. And you can see that that is Hong Kong and most people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese as their mother tongue. Although a lot of people would associate Cantonese as a minority language or dialect, or not the major language in China, it is actually, it actually has a lot of speakers. According to the envelope, the 2021 version, there were 85 million speakers of Cantonese in the world, making it the 18th most spoken language in the world. And it is a language of Hong Kong, Macau, Guangdong province, and some overseas Chinese communities such as Vancouver, some parts of Malaysia, and some parts of Singapore as well. And then we will look further at the written system and the spoken system of Cantonese Chinese at a rather superficial level. Here, we will go deeper in the following few slides. Here we can see that in Hong Kong, people write in traditional Chinese. This is the same as Taiwan. However, in mainland China, people use simplified Chinese as their written language. And then in the spoken form, Cantonese people of course use Cantonese and Mandarin speaker are not only limited to people in mainland China, but also people in Taiwan and also a lot of overseas Chinese communities as well. So, as you can see here, the traditional Chinese, as you can see, is in the middle of the table and simplified Chinese is on the right hand side of the table. And as you can see here, although we say that the two regions use different written system, the difference between traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese should not be overly exaggerated. So, some of the characters are the same. And most of them are different. Cantonese has been an identity marker of Hong Kong people for decades. As the tension between Hong Kong and China growing over the past 10 years or so, Cantonese's road as an identity marker also increases. In the past few years, the Hong Kong government has been pushing hard to use Mandarin instead of Cantonese as a medium of instruction in the Chinese curriculum at school. This has caused a lot of concerns about the status of Cantonese in Hong Kong and the erosion of Hong Kong identity. And recently, as we can see in the picture, Hong Kong's secretary for education made a remark saying, learning Chinese using Cantonese is not sustainable because the teaching of Chinese in the world relies on Mandarin. The government is accused of denigrating Cantonese. And this also caused a lot of concern as well. Because people think that what happened in Guangdong province would be happening in Hong Kong. And what happened in Guangdong province is something we are going to look at in the next slide. So, if you remember, I have shown you a map a few minutes ago, and then you can see that only part of Guangdong province use Cantonese as the native language. And the Cantonese is also associated with identity in Guangdong province, or at least people in Guangzhou also attach a lot of values to Cantonese. And one example is the support Cantonese protest that happened in 2010. The background of this protest is there were proposals for Guangdong's main television company to broadcast primarily in Mandarin. And the proposals angered a lot of citizens in Guangdong province because they fear that Cantonese is being signed lighted by the governments. And therefore, you can see in the picture, many people talk to the streets in July 2010 to show the support of Cantonese. Tell you that you may find quite a lot of variations between the romanization systems in Cantonese. At least three to four popular romanization systems, you can see if you are learning Cantonese of your interest in Cantonese, it may not be obvious to you, but at least there are three to four major romanization systems in Cantonese. The Guangdong romanization system, published by the Guangdong province education department, the Hong Kong Cantonese romanization scheme developed by the linguistic society of Hong Kong in 1993. The Yale romanization of Cantonese developed by BF Wang and Gerald Park in the 1950s. And in order to make it more consistent, I'm going to use the Hong Kong Cantonese romanization scheme in the rest of this presentation. So when I show you the examples, I'm going to use Hong Kong Cantonese romanization scheme. So, first, we are going to talk about the tones. In terms of technology, we are going to talk about the tones. First, because it is at least to me, it is the most intriguing part of Cantonese. And many people say that there were nine tones in Cantonese. However, linguists would normally agree that there were six distinctive tones in Hong Kong Cantonese. And the seventh, eighth and ninth tones, they are normally perceived or thought as the shorter version of tone one, tone three and tone six. If it is not very clear, I think there is no better way of showing the tones by giving you some examples. So you can see the numbers here from one to six, and these numbers represent the six distinctive tones in Hong Kong Cantonese. The first one, Fu means husband, the second tone, Fu means tiger, the third tone, Fu means deputy, or vice, for example vice president, vice chairman, etc. The supporting part of the supporting role of an organization or a position. The fourth one, Fu means support, the fifth tone, Fu means wife, the sixth tone means father. And you can see here, this is, there are six tones, and every tone represents a different world. And each word carries a different meaning. So if you mispronounce one tone, then the meaning of the whole sentence will be different. I'm going to give you one more example to show the other three quote unquote tone. So the three other tones are highlighted here. And when I say it, I hope that you can, you can feel that they are just the shorter version of tone one, tone three and tone six. The first tone, C, and then the seventh tone, sick, sick, as opposed to C in the first tone, the seventh one is shorter. The third tone, Si, means see, means try. And the variation of it is the eighth tone, that is said, said, so it is shorter. And then the ninth tone is the shorter version of the sixth tone, the sixth tone days, see, and the ninth tone is sick. So it is a shorter version of the sixth tone. Okay, so we have just looked at some distinctive features of the Cantonese tones. Next, we are going to look at some tone changes in Cantonese. The main tonal change occurs in compounds and rejuvenated expressions, as we can see below in the examples, like Fei, Fei, De, means rather fat or chubby. As you can see here, F, E, I, for denotes the first character, Fei, but F, E, I, to denote the second character, Fei, they're the same character. Because in this context, the Cantonese pronunciation or the Cantonese tone often change when you have the marker here. When you have some compounds like they to describe it is a little bit. So it changes when it has this kind of situation. And it occurs primarily where the second syllable of the compound or the rejuvenated word as a non high tonal. And the, we can see, we can look at another example here, like Ming, Ming, De, again, the first one, the first character, Ming. We used the fourth tone, as you can see here. And, but the second character, which is actually the same as the first one. But in this situation, we use the second tone, Ming, so Ming, Ming, De, again, De here means a little bit. So it is roughly understand. We roughly understand. And so they, and tone changes also happens in long works. As many of you may know, Hong Kong is a former British colony. And therefore, a lot of works in modern day Cantonese borrowed from borrowed from English. So, as you can see here, cheese in Cantonese, the, sorry. In a normal case scenario, it is pronounced see. But because it is a long work. It is not written in stone, but they just happened in a lot of long works. So, and, but in this case, you can see it changes to the second tone. So, instead of DC, and here, and you can also see the second character in the second example of this light. Oh, and this is second tone as well means order. Then we are going to look at some consonants in Cantonese. So you can see here, I'm not go into the detail here. Instead, I want to show you this. You can see in the picture here in the table here. Cantonese has many consonants that are the same as English, but they're not exactly the same. For example, we don't have the all sound in Cantonese, they're all consonant in Cantonese. And therefore, many Cantonese speaker have difficulties pronouncing the words run as in all UN and when in a daily conversation, you may find it difficult to understand whether they mean one or the O N or run our UN. And the same happens to learners of Cantonese to in English, because the English stops, for example, the P and B and versus the Cantonese stops here P. If we say because we don't have all in Cantonese, therefore, it may have some difficulty for Hong Kong people to pronounce one and run. This is the same for English speaking people, because in the Chinese world, in the Cantonese world by the second tone, as we can see here by the stop B. Because this sound is if we look at the English B, English B, it is voiced, but it is not in Cantonese. And if we look at the English sound, because it has aspiration, like, but Cantonese has not much aspiration in this sound in this bay sound. And therefore, the chances are English speakers, they found it very difficult because it sometimes it may sound like but sometimes it may sound like but actually it is something like in the middle, it is not voiced and it has very little aspiration and this will make, will pose some difficulties for learners of Cantonese. And here is the vowel systems of Cantonese. There are 11 vowels and 11 different in Cantonese, and seven of the vowels are long vowels and four of them are short. And so, because of time constraints, I think I'm not going to look into the vowels here. Rather, I would like to talk about something more interesting, which is the syllable structure. Like Mandarin, Cantonese has a relatively simple syllable structure. The possible combinations of sounds are severely restricted. And no consonant clusters, like in English, you have one word can have many syllables. For example, the word syllable, one word but three syllables. Okay. As I told you before, there are three different major ways to form complex work structure in Cantonese. There are no better ways than giving you an example to get my point clear. Let's look at some examples. The first one, rejuplication, doubling of words or syllables. We can see here the highlighted area. Jack, Jack means, if we just say Jack, that means one, like one cat is beautiful. If we have Jack, Jack here, so we here is the doubling of the word Jack, then it means each and every one of them is beautiful. So they are all beautiful. All the cats are beautiful. So this type of structure normally is normally used like before the noun. Or sometimes it can be omitted. The noun can be omitted if the context is clear. And then we have affixation, prefixes and suffixes. It's not prefix or suffix in the sense like English prefixes and suffixes. It is more like a modifier to give some meaning or give some mood to the character or to the word. As we can see here, hǎo tǎi, the highlighted area in the middle part of the slide. hǎo tǎi, hǎo means good, tǎi means look, a looking. So hǎo tǎi means good looking, so very easy to understand. Again, hǎo xiǎo, the second example, xiǎo means laugh, laughter. And hǎo xiǎo means laughable or hilarious. So the hǎo here acts like a prefix in Cantonese to describe the noun or the verb 笑 and tǎi, hǎo xiǎo and hǎo tǎi. After looking at the prefix, we are going to look at an example of suffixes. In the example we can see here, yuǎnmei zhǔyi, these are four characters. The first two characters mean perfect. And then the third and the fourth character means isam or principle. So when they are put together, it becomes yuǔnmei zhǔyi. So it is commonly used in Cantonese. When you put zhǔyi at the end, it normally means an ideology. So by extension, you can see another example, 女性主義, the first two characters, female, zhǔyi, again isam. So it acts as a suffix here. So when you put these four characters together, it means feminism. This expression means feminism. So sometimes you put two characters together to form different meanings. This type of structure is different from the previous two in this. The previous two structures are quite standardized. If you have, for example, hǒu, and then you will have a sense that it is used to describe and other words that follows. And then zhǔyi, if you see these two works, you will understand roughly it is about an ideology. So they are quite standardized and fixed. But in this type of structure, when you put two or more syllables or put two more works together, they can form different meaning. Or if the meaning is not completely different, the meaning can be slightly different from the original one. Or it adds more meanings. It adds more meaning to your original character. Here is an example, 毒, here the first syllable, 毒, means read. And then 书, means go. And when you put them together, it means study. Of course, they are not mutually exclusive. The meanings of study and the wider meaning of study and the literal meaning of read books, they are not mutually exclusive. So which meaning this phrase is conveying, often dependent on the context. And then we are going to move to the next part, a verbial constructions. There are three major forms of using a verbial constructions as modifier. Here verb plus 毒, the modifier, plus adjective. The same, which is quite similar to Mandarin. And then the second constructions, adjective plus an a verbial construction and then plus verb. And then we duplicated adjective plus a verbial construction and then plus verb. So I'm going to give you an example of each of these construction. The first one, 毒, I put Mandarin here just to give you a roadmap. Maybe some of you are learning Mandarin, or maybe you have some understanding of Mandarin. So it is, it may not be a bad idea to show you also the Mandarin structure as well, which is quite similar to Cantonese when we use the verbial 毒 here in the middle of the sentence. It is just used to describe this action 長聲 or 聲, which is good. And then the adjective and the second construction here is the adjective plus 感. It's an other a verbial in Cantonese plus verb. Again, it is used to describe the attitude here. We can see that 我唔係好認真咁學, the first one, the first character, or I, and then 唔係 not be,好 very. 認真 means serious, 感, thoughts, or you can understand it as in the way, and 學, study, or learning. So I'm not learning, I'm not learning in a way that is serious, so to make it shorter, I'm not studying it seriously. So 感 is used to describe the way he or she or I am studying, so not seriously study. Okay, we have just looked at how an a verbial used to describe a verb, used 感 to describe 學. So we are going to look at another example. Here, you can see the example in green. In Cantonese, it is 佢淨雞雞咁走咗, 佢淨雞雞咁走咗. So 雞 means chicken, chicken. The sentence has nothing to do with chicken. It is a set phrase in Cantonese. So 淨雞雞 is a set phrase in Cantonese that means doing something quietly. So the 感, a verbial here, it is used to describe the way this person, 佢, how did this person live? He left quietly. So if we don't look at the one, two, three, four, the middle four characters here, if we just ignore these characters for now, 佢走咗, he left. We don't know how he left, so we use an adjective 淨雞雞, and then 咁 in a way, he or she left in a quiet way. So it means she or he has left quietly. So 淨雞雞咁. So sometimes these kind of a verbial give people a feeling of playfulness as well. So this is the last part of our presentation. These two examples we just looked at in the previous two slides. If you still remember, in the first sentence, we have 佢唱得好好 in Cantonese. But look at the English meaning here at the bottom. He or she sing very well. Do we know when he sing or when he sang or when he has sung? We don't know. We can't tell when he sing or when he sang from this sentence because Chinese Cantonese doesn't have inflection. And therefore we cannot look at the verb 唱 and know that when it happens. And how are we going to know when something happens, when something happens in the past, in the present time, or in the future? There are two ways, at least two ways that I can show you in these slides, at least two ways. The first one, you add, for example, yesterday, you add the phrase or word yesterday, two words in Cantonese yesterday. 昨晚, in the middle of the sentence, 佢 here, he or she, 昨晚, if we add it here, 唱得好好, then we know that it happened last night or it happened yesterday. So add the words to denote the time. So this is one way of doing it. And the second way of doing it is to add another marker 左 here at the end. So in the second sentence, you can see 佢淨淨雞咁走左. So here, we don't have a particular phrase or word to denote the time. We don't know when it happens, but it has happened. It's in the past. How do we know about that? Because of the word 左 here at the end of the sentence. So in Cantonese, we also use 左 as one of the markers to denote something happened in the past. And of course, there are different expressions used to denote something is going to denote that something is going to happen in the future. Something has not happened yet or something is happening or it is not about time. It is just a general meaning like 佢唱得好好 can be just a phrase or can be just a sentence, a general statement to tell the interlocutors that this person is a good singer. So thank you very much for staying till the end. I hope you have at least a little bit of understanding of Cantonese after this presentation. Thank you very much. See you.