Evidence of 嘅 and 唔 as bona-fide characters?

[Mark Yong]

I was browsing through Taiwan 三民 edition of the 三字經 recently, and noticed something:

On one of the first few pages of the book is a photograph of a very old issue of the text. What caught my attention is that it glossed the following characters:

之 - 嘅

不 - 唔

Could this lend support that 嘅 and 唔 are not recently-coined characters from Hong Kong for the possessive gei and negative ng, but are the actual words from antiquity?

[anonymoose]

Characters were used in a non-standardised way to write various dialects of Chinese long before the status of Mandarin was elevated, and character usage standardised to suit Mandarin. Therefore it is not surprising that characters traditionally used to write dialects such as Cantonese and Fujianese should be visible in old texts.

I'm not familiar with Cantonese or Fujianese, but I know that 唔 is used in Shanghainese, in the very limited situations that Shanghainese is written down.

[Hofmann]

嘅 might not be new, because it's in 康熙字典, but it doesn't mean 之. 唔 is new, and there aren't any variants recorded in the variant dictionary.

[jbradfor]

Hofmann, what variant dictionary do you use? I think it's about time I get a bit familiar with them....

[Mark Yong]

anonymoose wrote:

Therefore it is not surprising that characters traditionally used to write dialects such as Cantonese and Fujianese should be visible in old texts.

Hofmann wrote:

嘅 might not be new, because it's in 康熙字典, but it doesn't mean 之. 唔 is new, and there aren't any variants recorded in the variant dictionary.

This is interesting, because I would have thought that if anything, dialect characters would not have been used to gloss a canonical text like the 三字經. My impression was that writing in any dialect - including Mandarin - was frowned upon in the pre-modern era of Chinese literature (of course, I am aware that even 文言文 Classical Chinese had its origins in the 魯 Lu dialect of 孔子 Confucius' time).

[Hofmann]

Hofmann, what variant dictionary do you use?

教育部異體字字典

[MakMak]

A friend of mine says this.

Try this book on page 108 and 111 (example #6 but I think he wants to say 5... ) if you're interested

[jbradfor]

Thanks Hoffman! [Weirdly enough, firefox defaulted to 'Western (Windows-1252)' encoding. Some trial-and-error and I selected Big-5 and it was much much better B) First time I've seen firefox get the encoding wrong in a while.]

[Mark Yong]

MakMak wrote:

A friend of mine says this.

Try this book on page 108 and 111 (example #6 but I think he wants to say 5... ) if you're interested

Silly me... I actually have a copy of this book! :rolleyes:

I checked out the section on 個/箇. While I am inclined to agree with what was written there, I believe that article refers to 個/箇 as a demonstrative particle (the equivalent of the Mandarin 那), rather than a possessive particle (equivalent of 之/的).