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I was surprised to begin the work week with about $7 in my pocket. Didn't I just withdraw money the other day? So yesterday I tramped over to my bank to take out $200 dollars--and promptly blew a quarter of the amount on used books at a store around the corner.

Ah.

One of the titles I picked up was Cantonese: a comprehensive grammar by Matthews and Yip. I've been eyeing this for years--used copies show up frequently around here--but this particular example had the right combination of condition and price, plus it was the "corrected" edition to boot. (Even so, I think [livejournal.com profile] caitalainn would be appalled at some of the poor proofreading. I certainly was!)

When I lucked into a copy of Huang's Speak Cantonese several years ago, the first thing I did was leaf through it looking for phrases memorised from years of watching Hong Kong movies. Most I found relatively easily, but two eluded me. One sounded like "May see-ah?" and meant something like "What's going on?" The closest I could find was Mātyéh sih a? (lit. "What affair(s)?"), which is best characterised as a near miss. From Matthews and Yip, however, I find confirmation of something I'd long suspected: In colloquial speech, mātyéh contracts to m'yē or mī'eh. [One of the book's not-so-charming inconsistencies: It gives one variant in some places, another variant in others without explaining the alternation.]

The other expression was something like "Hye-mey?" and tends to be glossed as "Really?" in subtitles. The first part was easy: haih is the equivalent of Mandarin 是. An extension of its role as copula is it's use a particle of affirmation. (To put it roughly, the Chinese don't say "yes" or "no", they say "it is" or "it isn't". In this respect they are--believe or not--just like Welshmen.) But what was the second? I wondered if it couldn't be a worn-down version of mhaih ("is not"). After all, it's common to use haih mhaih to question the veracity of a state of affairs. "Is or isn't it the case that..."

That now looks like a false trail. One of the distinctive features of Cantonese is its bewildering wealth of sentence-final particles. Mandarin has a few, true, but they're nothing in comparison. Matthews and Yip list about a dozen basic particles which combine to yield over forty possibilities, each with its own usage and range of nuance. Among them is which "marks questions with negative presuppositions". That is haih mē would mean "It is?" when you thought that it wasn't. Seems a darn good match for the common use of "Really?" in English, haih mhaih?
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Date: 2005-10-26 10:19 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] snowy-owlet.livejournal.com
Yay! Another reason to love Welsh! I say, when in doubt, use more words.

(this is yet another reason why I am SO much happier writing prose)

Now quick: gimme those two Welsh phrases! Please?
Date: 2005-10-27 12:44 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] muckefuck.livejournal.com
Ah, but you see, Welsh isn't like Chinese. Its verbs conjugate fully in traditional Indo-European style. Since you reply by repeating the verb form (negated in order to show disagreement), there are literally scores of possibilities. This handy page lists some of the most common.

For instance, Oes llaeth? ("Got milk?") would be answered either with Oes or Does (a contraction of Nid oes). But Ti wedi blino? ("Are you tired?") would be answered with Ydw or Dw i ddim.
Date: 2005-10-27 02:38 pm (UTC)

From: [identity profile] snowy-owlet.livejournal.com
Page title: clwb malu cachu
What I read: Club Macchu Picchu
Date: 2005-10-27 12:23 am (UTC)

From: [identity profile] tyrannio.livejournal.com
Speaking of sentence-final particles, I'm reminded of one of my mother's stories. We were in Thailand, and she had learned Thai pretty well, except that she hadn't mastered the politeness particles. When she spoke to people she didn't know on the phone, they always assumed she was a very rude Thai (partly because it was rare for foreigners to learn Thai in the 1970s).

Bureaucrats would retaliate by taking advantage of the optionality of tense-marking (via adverbs) in Thai to obscure whether they'd actually done what she was asking, or whether they were just saying it might be done in the future.

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