Perfective suffix in different dialects (Ramsey)

[OneEye]

I'm doing a review on Ramsey's The Languages of China for an anthropology class this semester. I know printing Chinese characters in English books was a different matter in the 80's than it is now, but still, it's quite frustrating at times to be given simply a transliteration and no characters. Most of the time (so far) I can find the characters he's talking about pretty easily, but not so when he's talking about dialects.

He gives this example in Ch. 3:

The various dialects often use totally unrelated grammatical forms--for the perfective suffix, for example.

meaning

perfective

Peking

-le

Cantonese

-tso

Min (Fuzhou)

0

Hakka

-e

Wu (Shanghai)

(reduplication)

Well, that isn't really helpful, because he doesn't go into any explanation of how they're unrelated. Simply giving the characters here would, I'd think, be very illuminating. Maybe even an example of how reduplication is used in 吳.

So, can anyone help me out with these examples? Or maybe even point me to some way of finding these things out for myself, since I'm sure there will be much more of this in later chapters. Thanks in advance.

[chrix]

Does Ramsey call them "dialects"? I think in linguistics, now terms like "regiolect" or "Sinitic language" are preferred.

[Hofmann]

30 years old. Maybe they weren't so careful about what they called these languages back then.

FYI, Beijingese "le" is probably 了, according to this.

the Cantonese "tso" is probably 著, 丁呂切, according to me.

[chrix]

Yeah, what I saying was that one probably shouldn't call them "dialects" in a class review today.

Agree on 了 着 (I assume the latter came from Middle Chinese as well).

Is is really true that perfectivity is expressed by zero in Min? I seem to remember there was something for Minnanyu, but Fuzhouhua might be different...

[WilsonFong]

I believe the Cantonese "tso" is more commonly written as 咗

From http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/846/

[OneEye]

Sorry, I should have said I knew about 了. It's others I'm worried about.

He does call them 'dialects,' but he often puts the term in quotes. He talks about the subject in chapter 1, and it seems his choice of term is based on the opinions of the general Chinese population more than linguistic considerations.

It may also be based on convenience for the lay reader. He avoids IPA for this reason, in favor of what seems like his own transcription system (which for the most part avoids non-Latin characters). He also uses old transliterations such as Chungking, Foochow, Canton because they are already "well-known English names," and says that "to normalize these spellings" into Chongqing, Fuzhou, and Guangzhou "would serve only to make them sound less familiar." I assume from this that his intended audience is not specialists, but it still does cause some irritation while reading (and makes me think of my professor, whose specialty is unrelated to China, saying things like "Pee-king" and "Mao Tsaytoong").

[chrix]

Sure (as I don't know much about Cantonese, I'll just take your word for it), but the way it's written is not necessarily indicative of its origin.... 著 was present in Middle Chinese, and became a stative marker in Mandarin, but it would be feasible it took a different route in Cantonese, but of course one would like to look at some solid historical data for that...

[Hofmann]

Many mouth-radicaled characters were created in place of alternate readings of existing characters.

[Daan]

I'd assume the books Don_Horhe posted about here would contain the information you're looking for, but unfortunately I've not been able to get my hands on them yet.

[OneEye]

I don't know how, but I had completely forgotten about those. Thanks for reminding me, Daan. It looks like they have a copy of each at the university library here. I was planning on going there tomorrow for some other work anyway, so I guess I'll be checking that out as well.

[Don_Horhe]

I'd assume the books Don_Horhe posted about here would contain the information you're looking for, but unfortunately I've not been able to get my hands on them yet.

I looked through them this morning, 汉语方言概要 in particular. The perfective marker in Cantonese is 咗, while the Hakka 'e' one has no written form. The second edition of the book was published in 1980, though, with a revision and reprint in 2000, so things might have changed.

[jiangping]

What about the Hokkien 啊? My Hokkien is very basic, but I thought it was roughly equivalent to Mandarin's sentence-end 了, which can often seem to bring some perfective aspect (although I think this issue is still not clear). It also seems often to combine with the perfective (right?) pre-verbal 有. Any ideas?

[creamyhorror]

Singapore Hokkien seems to use "liao" (pronounced exactly like hanyupinyin 'liao4') for the perfective. There are probably alternatives, but this one comes to mind.

[Hofmann]

I'm not so sure about 著 anymore. There's a thread about it here.

[chrix]

I don't know Cantonese so it's hard for me to comment, but it is clear that high-frequency particles can undergo exceptional sound changes, so I think the jury is still out on that one...