Chinese Pidgin English Pronouns Revisited

Geoff Smith English Centre The University of 1

Abstract

Chinese Pidgin English was a thriving medium of inter-cultural communication on the south coast from around the mid to late 18th century to the early 20th century. A number of accounts of the grammar have appeared, including descriptions of the pronoun system. Some problems remain, however, and new light can be shed on these by consideration not only of English language accounts, but by Chinese language sources, especially Tong’s Chinese and English Instructor (英語 集全). It was found that there were considerable differences in the choice of singular pronouns in the English and Chinese sources. Since does not have any case distinctions, it was surprising to find that there was more differentiation of case in the Instructor data. Plural pronouns rarely appear either in English sources or in the Instructor, which has only a few varied representations of an incipient first person plural form. Reliance on Tong as the main source of information from Chinese, however, may not reflect the variability of everyday speech. The exact mechanism by which ‘my’ became the unlikely choice of generic first person pronoun also remains to be elucidated.

Introduction: Chinese Pidgin English

Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) is in many ways the ‘mother of all pidgins’ having given its name to the pidgin languages through an interpretation of the English word ‘business’ (Baker & Mühlhäusler, 1990, p. 93). It arose in the context of trade between Europeans and Chinese on the south China coast from around the mid-18th century. The typological distance between Chinese and European languages coupled with severe restrictions placed on the movements of visiting traders meant that command of the trading partners’ language was not feasible during the early contact period and for a considerable time thereafter (Van Dyke, 2005).

The Portuguese had been in the area considerably earlier, establishing a trading post in Macau from the early 16th century, and it is likely that a pidginised form of Portuguese was used here during the early days of contact. However, Macau had become something of a trading backwater by the mid-17th century. A renewed expansion of trading opportunities between European maritime traders and Chinese entrepreneurs from the 18th century onwards was mainly conducted at Canton (now Guangzhou) with relay points in the Pearl River Delta such as Whampoa, in addition to the established settlement at Macau. As English became the most widely used of the European languages, with a minimal Portuguese presence at Canton, it was a pidgin with a largely English-derived lexicon which became the essential medium of trade communication from then until the early 20th century. The relexification of an existing Portuguese pidgin could have played a role in the formation of CPE, although direct

Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics 11,1 (2008); pp. 65 −78 G. Smith | 66 evidence for this is lacking. There are a number of words in CPE of Portuguese origin, such as ‘piccaninny’ (< pequeno , small), ‘savee’ (< saber , to know), ‘joss’ (< deus , god), and ‘mandarin’ (< mandarim, counselor), although a number of Portuguese words such as the first two of these had already appeared in pidgins worldwide by this time. The existence of a Cantonese substrate is very much in evidence in CPE, both in terms of phonology and syntax.

Although CPE became an essential trade language for Europeans and an avenue of upward mobility for Chinese, the pidgin never creolised, and appears to have been used exclusively as a second language for a limited range of functions during its existence. The language situation in Canton in addition to the dominant Cantonese, Mandarin was also spoken meant that it had little relevance for inter-ethnic communication among Chinese. It did have a potential role in communication between Chinese people speaking different dialects as more treaty ports such as Shanghai were opened for external trade, but, to some extent, the existence of a common written standard served the same function. As more Chinese people were educated in Standard English in the British colony of Hong Kong, established in 1842, the pivotal role of CPE was gradually eroded, and the language went into terminal decline from about the beginning of the 20th century.

Pronouns in English and Chinese

The pronoun paradigm in English is somewhat more complex than that of Chinese. The first person differentiates subject, object and possessive forms in both the singular and plural (I, me, my, we, us, our). Second person pronouns do not distinguish subject and object or singular and plural, so the forms are restricted to ‘you’ and ‘your’. Third person singular forms additionally distinguish masculine and feminine (he, she, it, him, her, his, its) while gender neutral forms occur in the plural (they, them, their). In Chinese, there are a smaller number of basic particles which provide an analytic framework to construct the pronoun paradigm. The situation is complicated by the fact that Standard Written Chinese forms are used when reading and writing, even by Cantonese speakers, but the spoken paradigm diverges from this. In Standard Written Chinese, basic first, second and third person forms are respectively 我 wǒ ‘I’, 你 nǐ ‘you’ and 他 tā ‘he, she, it’. Plural forms are derived by adding the particle 們 men and possessives by adding 的 de .2

Table 1 Pronoun paradigm in Standard Written Chinese

Personal Possessive First singular 我 ‘I, me’ 我的 ‘my’ First plural 我們 ‘we, us’ 我們的 ‘our’ Second singular 你 ‘you’ 你的 ‘your’ Second plural 你們 ‘you’ 你們的 ‘your’ Third singular 他 ‘he, she, it, him, her’ 他的 ‘his, her, its’ Third plural 他們 ‘they’ 他們的 ‘their’

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The situation is slightly complicated by the existence of distinct masculine and feminine written forms of the third person singular他 tā ‘he’ and 她 tā ‘she’ respectively although there is no difference in the pronunciation, so they are indistinguishable in speech.

In Cantonese, the paradigm has an identical shape. However, while the same Chinese characters 我 ‘I’ and 你 ‘you’ are used for first and second person forms, the pronunciation is different, namely ngóh and néih respectively. 3 In addition, different forms are used for third person, plural and possessive, pronounced kéuih , deih and ge respectively. Since these are not represented in the Standard Written Chinese character inventory, special Cantonese characters 佢 kéuih , 哋 deih and 嘅 ge have been adopted to indicate these.

Table 2 Pronoun paradigm in Cantonese

Personal Possessive First singular 我 ‘I, me’ 我嘅 ‘my’ First plural 我哋 ‘we, us’ 我哋嘅 ‘our’ Second singular 你 ‘you’ 你嘅 ‘your’ Second plural 你哋 ‘you’ 你哋嘅 ‘your’ Third singular 佢 ‘he, she, it, him, her’ 佢嘅 ‘his, her, its’ Third plural 佢哋 ‘they, them’ 佢哋嘅 ‘their’

CPE Grammar

Numerous references were made to CPE in works by early travellers to the Far East during the 18th and 19th centuries. For many, the language was a source of amusement or curiosity and few attempts were made to understand or describe the system beyond its quaintness. Comments were typically negative, describing the pidgin as a corrupted, bastardised or mangled form of the standard language, but admittedly that was in the days before there was a general understanding of language contact phenomena such as pidginisation. Many of the references to pidgin are quite brief, with merely a vague description of the language used or a few words illustrating it.

The biggest corpus of texts produced in the 19th century was Charles Leland’s Pidgin English Sing-song (1876), a 140-page collection of poems, anecdotes and the like, along with a vocabulary and some very brief grammatical notes. Although much in this work conforms to the style of CPE as described by other observers, as a corpus it is seriously flawed. It now appears that the author never ventured to the region, and constructed his texts from language whose vocabulary and grammar were gleaned from others’ descriptions, probably in the British Library. One major problem is that CPE changed considerably during its history, and as Baker and Mühlhäusler (1990) have pointed out, there is great inconsistency in the kind of language used by Leland, mixing up constructions used at widely different periods. More seriously, some of the constructions used appear to be fabrications, based on the kind of language found in pidgins elsewhere, such as the suffix ‘-fella’ well known from Australian and Melanesian pidgins, but shown to be unattested in CPE (Baker, 1987).

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A more serious attempt to deal with the language was the work of Hall (1944, 1952), who gave a comprehensive account of the language according to the sources available to him and his own investigation of those who could still claim to speak CPE. A corpus of samples transcribed by him in a broad phonetic transcription are one of the best authentic sources of the language, even though the speakers were native English speakers recalling the language they used a considerable time earlier (Baker, 1987). Hall considered that plural pronouns did not exist, but this may have been due to the limited data at his disposal, as a number of attestations of plural forms will be documented below.

Baker and Mühlhäusler (1990) take a more detailed look at pronouns and point out the puzzle of the late adoption of ‘my’ as the form most widely used as first person pronouns both in subject and non-subject positions, a question examined in more detail below.

Sources of Information

For many years, the only generally available information about CPE consisted of the English language sources. Recently, however, these have been supplemented by some valuable comparative data in Chinese. The data used for the analysis in this paper consist of both English and Chinese sources.

English Language Sources

An exhaustive collection of attestations of CPE in English sources was compiled by Baker (1987). Although these remain unpublished, they have been made available for research as two sub-corpora entitled CPE1 and CPE2. These have been painstakingly annotated to show the source, speaker, date, location and other relevant information, and comprise a corpus of around 15,000 words.

Chinese Language Sources

In the light of the considerable problems faced in determining the accuracy of the samples of language interpreted by European observers, it would be very instructive to be able to compare this perspective from the Chinese point of view. Until recently this was not possible, but the discovery of a couple of important sources has now made a comparison possible. The existence of manuals (sometimes referred to as ‘chapbooks’, representing the pronunciation of (pidgin) English terms in Cantonese as represented by Chinese characters has long been recognised. They were commented on by early visitors to the region (e.g., Hunter, 1882), but it is only recent that detailed analyses of one of these, The common language of the red-haired foreigners (紅毛通用番話 Hùhng mòuh tūng yuhng fāan wah ), have been undertaken (Baker, 1989; Bolton, 2003; Selby & Selby, 1995; Shi, 1993). In these glossaries, each entry comprises a word in Chinese and below it an English translation in the form of a number of Chinese characters representing the pronunciation of the English term as far as this is possible within the constraints of Cantonese phonology. It is interesting to note that a similar system is still employed in the traditional Chinese almanacs (通勝) sold today. However, the booklets generally only provide single words, and thus provide little insight into CPE grammar. Several different versions are known to have been produced.

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A more substantial source of texts is a remarkable six-volume work called The Chinese and English instructor (英語集全) produced around 1860 by Tong King-sing (唐景星), confusingly also known as Tang Ting-Shu, Tong Ting-ku and A-Ku. In this six-volume work, only volumes four and six are relevant to CPE. These two volumes contain extended dialogues, mainly about trade negotiations and related situations. The layout of the Instructor pages shows four divisions for each entry into which are inserted four sections of information. The target phrase or sentence in English is presented, and the Chinese equivalent is shown. The pronunciation of the Chinese in Cantonese is written in a novel romanised script. Finally, the pronunciation of the English expression is rendered as precisely as possible. This is done through Chinese characters according to their pronunciation in Cantonese, but there are also various diacritic marks representing sounds which are difficult or impossible to represent in Chinese. For example, a small triangle represents inter-dental fricatives, as explained in Tong’s introduction. Although the author was an entrepreneur apparently untrained in linguistics, the Instructor nevertheless shows considerable linguistic sophistication.

The main sections of the Instructor are devoted to Standard English, and tell us little about CPE. Fortunately, however, in the margins are scribbled the CPE equivalents of some of the entries. These seem to have been added after the production of the main work, and it is not known whether it was Tong or someone else who added them. It is this collection of marginalia which constitutes the largest single collection of CPE texts so far known. A full transcript with translations of the CPE marginalia from the Instructor appears in Li, Matthews and Smith (2005) and it provides the main Chinese data for this paper.

Pronouns in the Text Samples

English Sources

The data used in this analysis consist of the total number of pronouns in the texts comprising CPE 1 and 2 assembled by Baker (1987). Each was tabulated according to whether it occurred in the subject or object position or was used as a possessive. There is a wide discrepancy between the number of singular and plural pronouns very few of the latter were encountered, a point noted by Baker and Huber (2000), who comment that the overwhelming majority of dialogues recorded in CPE are between a single European and a single Chinese person. Those first and third person plural pronouns that can be found are recorded in a separate table. Second person plural pronouns have not been distinguished from singular ones as the forms are identical, and it is frequently not possible to determine the number of referents in the absence of context. As far as we can see, singular forms appear to be the very large majority.

A breakdown of the figures for the singular pronouns in different syntactic roles is as follows:

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Table 3 Singular pronouns English sources (CPE 1 and 2, Baker, 1987)

First Person Subject Object Possessive I 180 0 0 me 55 56 0 my 296 73 100 mine 0 0 1 Second Person you 384 133 13 your 0 0 12 Third Person he 319 95 18 him 8 28 3 his 0 0 6 she 16 18 3 her 0 4 1 it 6 1 0

A number of observations can be made. For first person pronouns, it can be seen that the form with the largest number of tokens by far is ‘my’ and that this form occurs in all positions. The number of tokens in subject position is considerably greater, but this may be because of the kind of data recorded. An alternative form ‘me’ is also found, although less than a quarter of the number of ‘my’. The use of ‘me’ is divided roughly equally between subject and object position. No cases of ‘I’ were recorded in the corpus in anything other than subject position. As will be discussed below, the use of ‘my’ is by no means constant throughout the time span of the corpus. ‘You’ is the form almost exclusively used in the second person. In the third person, a considerable variety of forms is attested, with masculine and feminine forms as well as subject and object distinctions. However, the numbers are very small for anything except ‘he’, which appears to have become established as the canonical form in all positions.

As to plural pronouns, Table 4 displays the details:

Table 4 Plural pronouns English sources (CPE 1 and 2, Baker, 1987)

First Person Subject Object Possessive we 18 0 0 us 0 4 0 allo thisee man 1 Third Person they 7 2 0 them 1 4 0

The occurrence of ‘allo thisee man’ is an interesting development, but only a single token is found. In spite of the number of attestations of ‘we’, most of these were from only two speakers, one a south Indian Muslim on the China coast in 1854 and the other a Chinese speaker in Queensland in 1907. The use of this pronoun was otherwise not at | 71 Chinese Pidgin English pronouns revisited all common and very few instances of speakers using plural pronouns of any kind have been recorded.

Chinese Sources

As explained above, two references, The common language of the red-haired foreigners and The Chinese and English instructor , constitute the Chinese sources for this study.

The common language of the red-haired foreigners ( 紅毛通用番話) (c. 1850)

Two pronouns are listed: 我 I, me 味 mih (> meih ) 你 you 呶 nàauh (romanised as lòuh in Bolton, 2003) In spite of the widespread appearance of ‘my’ at the time the Common Language booklet was in use, 味 mih ‘me’ is the preferred choice. The selection of 呶 nàauh ‘you’ is something of a puzzle, as the pronoun is invariably represented by yū in the Instructor data. Bolton romanises this as lòuh and it is not clear if this is a suggestion for an alternative pronunciation or reading it as a different character. The character itself is very badly formed and somewhat difficult to read, but 呶 nàauh ‘you’ appears to represent the correct reading. One possibility is that it is a representation of the alternative English singular pronoun ‘thou’, which still persists in some dialects of English and was presumably commoner in the 19th century. It has been seen that Tong did use special diacritics to mark inter-dental fricatives to modify existing Cantonese phonemes in the main body of his work, and it is possible that there may have been a similar intention here by the compilers of the booklet, although this would be unlikely to diffuse to the general reading population.

The Chinese and English instructor (1862)

Table 5 lists the singular pronouns as covered in The Chinese and English instructor :

Table 5 Singular Pronouns The Chinese and English Instructor ( 英語集全, Tong, 1862)

First Person Subject Object Possessive 米 máih 170 11 9 未 mih (> meih ) 3 36 0 挨 (ng)āai 45 0 0 買 máaih 1 2 6 Second Person 㕭 yū 237 57 17 㕭亞 yū a 0 0 3 Third Person 希 hī (> hēi ) 84 43 4 謙 hīm 0 3 0

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In the texts from the Instructor, the use of the second person yū ‘you’ is invariant in all positions apart from an additional three tokens of yū a ‘your’ as a possessive. In the main work, Tong uses the fanqie ( 反切) character 㕭, composed of a mouth radical 口 and 夭 yīu to make it clear that the vowel in the English ‘you’ is different from the Cantonese vowels in 夭 yīu and also 魚 yūh , but similar to the one in 估 gu . Since there is not a Cantonese character with a pronunciation yu , the fanqie character was devised, and this also features in the marginalia. The use of 希 hī ‘he’ is almost universal for the third person singular, although a few tokens of 謙 hīm ‘him’ occur in the object position. There appears to be some case differentiation, with some tokens of 買 máaih (with a contrasting long vowel) ‘my’ used for the possessive, and also many tokens of 挨 āai ‘I’ in the subject position. The most common form for the subject pronoun, however, remains 米 máih ‘my’, while proportionally larger numbers of the character 未 mih ‘me’ occur in the object position. It thus appears that in the Instructor data, there was significant differentiation between subject and object forms. It should be noted that the pronunciation of some of these characters is different in modern Cantonese from 19th-century Cantonese, as shown both by Tong’s own romanised script and accounts by early missionaries such as Morrison (1828). The diphthongisation of ‘i’ to ‘ei’ took place sometime around the end of the 19th century, which means that characters currently pronounced meih (未) and hēi (希) would have been rendered as ‘mih’ and ‘hi’ at that time.

Before leaving singular pronouns from the Chinese sources, it is interesting to note that this same system is still used today in traditional Chinese almanacs to represent a glossary of English words. Samples of vocabulary indicate that these have probably been reproduced unchanged from year to year for a considerable time, since words such as ‘picul’ and ‘quintal’ still appear long after they have dropped out of use in English. The following are the pronouns which occur in the 2004 version of the almanac: 佢 he 稀 hēi (C19th = hī) 你 you 要 yīu 我 I 亞愛 a-(ng)oi The last entry appears to be a fanqie character as described in Tong’s Instructor, adopting a system used in some early dictionaries to indicate pronunciation where the initial sound of the first character and the final of the second are merged to indicate the novel sound. Since the character 嗌 or 挨 aai can have a pronunciation similar to the English target, it may seem puzzling why this should have been done in this case. However, these sounds are often alternatively preceded by a nasal, and the fanqie reading may have been to disambiguate this.

Plural pronouns

Table 6 shows the plural pronouns in The Chinese and English instructor :

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Table 6 Plural pronouns The Chinese and English Instructor ( 英語集全, Tong, 1862)

First Person Subject Object Possessive wi 2 two man 1 two piecee man 1 me long you 1 (These numbers refer only to the CPE marginalia.)

As noted above, plural pronouns are not a prominent feature of CPE texts. The overwhelming majority of dialogues recorded are between a single European and a single Chinese person. However, some plural forms can be found in the Instructor, and although the number is small they are of considerable interest as incipient productive forms. A number of plural pronouns appear in the main body of the work, which is the translation of Standard English phrases into Chinese, with an attempt to represent the sounds of English. Those entries with plural pronouns which also have CPE marginalia are discussed below.

First person plural forms are found both in subject and object positions in the English sentences in the main body of the Instructor. Of the five tokens of the subject form, four different ways of representing it in CPE are encountered. Firstly, there is a single token of ‘we’ being used:

1. (口維)都孖罅米記務乎 wī dōu mā la máih gi mouh fùh we tomorrow make(e) move ‘We move tomorrow.’

The first character appears to have been created to represent the sound ‘we’ by the fanqie principle of combining the initial of one sound and the final of another to create sounds which are possible but not actually realised in Cantonese. Indeed, the lack of a character may have been one of the reasons that the form was not adopted more widely in CPE.

Another token of ‘we’ is described below in the discussion of ‘us,’ where an object form in English is re-interpreted as subject ‘we’.

Secondly, the term ‘two man’ is used on one occasion.

2. 都文椏鏬閃 dōu màhn ā la sím two man all(a) same ‘We are both alike.’

A third strategy is simply to use the singular form, found twice in the data:

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3. 米哪吉温店跛梳乜治 máih noh gāt wān dīm bāi sō māt jih my no got one time pay so much(ee) ‘We have never paid such price before.’

4. 米安黎(口結)治撻地打鏬温卑士文 máih ōn làih get jih daat dih dā la wān bī sih màhn my only catch(ee) thirty dollar one piece(e) man ‘We only receive $30 per head.’

Finally, for the inclusive sense of ‘we’ there is a single token of the form ‘me (a)long you’, an interesting parallel with forms in pidgins elsewhere; for example, the Tok Pisin inclusive form yumi contrasts with the exclusive mipela :

5. 米郎㕭哥思希 máih lòhng yū gō sī hēi my (a)long you go see he ‘We will go together to have an interview.’

This variety in representation appears to indicate that no stabilised form had been established at the time the Instructor was produced, even though it apparently indicates a need for a form to fill this lexical gap.

In the eight cases of the object form ‘us’ occurring in the English phrases, four are simply ignored as the presence of the referent is presumably to be inferred from the context:

6. 麽別打鬱拜晏拜地凌其 mō biht dā wāt baai aan baai dih lìhng kìh more better wait by and by drink(ee) ‘Let us wait awhile and then drink again.’

In two cases, the form ‘two piecee man’ is used instead. It should be noted that here the pronoun has been rearranged with the phrase ‘let us’, which uses an object form but serves as a subject:

7. 威(竹+厘)溫都卑上文吉地地化倫上(= 士?) wāi (lēi?) wān dōu bēi seuhng màhn gāt deih deih fa lèuhn seuhng (= sih?) very (velly) well, two piece(e) man cut(tee) difference ‘Well then, let us split the difference.’ (The use of 上 seuhng here is probably a misprint for the similarly shaped 士 sih , which fits much better.)

One single token shows the use of the singular form ‘me’:

8. 濕煲素那吉卑剪㕭甘碌思未 sāp bōu sou náh gāt bī jín yū gām lūk sī mī suppos(o) no got pidgin you come look-see me ‘Give us a call when convenient.’

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Finally, in one case, the object form glossed as ‘let us’ is reinterpreted as a subject form and represented by ‘we’:

9. (口維)哥拿打西薛當託記 wī gō nàh dā sāi sit dong tok gi we go (a)nother side sit down talk(ee) ‘Let us rise and have a little talk.’

In the case of third person plural pronouns, although the terms ‘they’ and ‘them’ are reasonably common in the English phrases or sentences to be translated, the large majority are simply ignored in the CPE equivalents. Of 14 tokens of ‘they’, all but one are ignored, as, for example, in:

10. 椏鏬閃溫哥(竹+厘)底 ā la sím wān gō (lēi) dái all(a) same one quality ‘They are all of the same quality.’

The only exception is a single token of the singular form ‘hi’:

11. 喝店希吩你時 hot dīm hī fīn níh sìh what time he finishee ‘When they have done?’

A similar situation is found for ‘them’. Of 30 tokens in the English samples, 28 are ignored, for example:

12. 糯蚊灣治 noh mān wāan jih no man want(chee) ‘Nobody wants them.’

This is generally in accord with Cantonese syntax, where an object pronoun would not be obligatory, especially with inanimate objects. The two remaining cases use the singular form ‘hi’:

13. 㕭哪刦希罩罩 yū noh gip hī jaau jaau you no give he chow-chow ‘You have not fed them properly.’

Last, there were no distinct third person plural forms found in the data.

Those familiar with pidgins elsewhere may immediately suspect that the suffix -ee or -um on the end of verbs may function as a ‘transitive marker’ which renders the explicit statement of an object pronoun redundant. Consider, for example:

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14. 梳花臣哪（口件）些林 sō fā sèuhn noh gehn sē làhm so fashion no can sellum ‘Therefore it was difficult to get rid of them.’

15. 米哪灣治 máih noh wāan jih my no want(chee) ‘I don’t want them.’

However, it is clear that the -um suffix is only attached to verbs ending in ‘l’ (Baker & Mühlhäusler, 1990) and there is no evidence that there is any transitive function for either ending. They appear merely to be adaptations of word endings to Cantonese phonotactic patterns.

Discussion: Comparison of English and Chinese data

Baker and Huber (2000) have argued that English speakers using gestures for basic communication are likely to have had a large part in the almost worldwide adoption of object pronouns as the basic form in incipient pidgins. Thus ‘me’ (sometimes spelled ‘mi’) is the canonical form for first person pronouns in pidgins and creoles from the south-west Pacific to the Caribbean. Typically ‘me’ can serve as a universal first person singular pronoun regardless of case although there is a good deal of variation with alternative forms, especially in the early periods of pidgin or Creole formation. It is not surprising that early attestations of CPE contain a variety of forms in the English sources. It is somewhat more surprising that pronoun forms in the Instructor data show such a well-defined differentiation of subject and object forms. Although ‘my’ is found in all positions, of nine tokens of the contrasting form 買 máaih (with a contrastive long vowel), two-thirds function as possessives, and of those 40 or so tokens of 未 mih , over 90% are in the object position. Similarly, although the canonical form for the third person singular is 希 hī , those few tokens of 謙 hīm that occur are all in the object position.

The establishment of ‘my’ as the canonical form of the first person singular pronoun demands some explanation. Baker (1989) has looked at this problem, and noted that only ‘I’ was attested in the 18th-century sources. Thereafter ‘me’ also co-occurred until the 1830s when the use of ‘my’ rapidly became the dominant form. Baker concludes that the appearance of the pronunciation booklets around that time was responsible for the change. It is suggested that a writer in whose language the normal Cantonese 米 máih was pronounced ‘mi’ could have written this form in one of the booklets, which was subsequently read as ‘my’ by the Cantonese-speaking readership. Somewhere around Macau, the possible origin of the writers of the booklet, is suggested as a promising place to look into.

The change to the predominance of ‘my’ within a short period of about ten years at around the same time as the printed or written media began to be widely used does appear to be too much of a coincidence. However compelling this circumstantial evidence, it is hard to confirm with hard facts, and so far explanations have amounted to little more than conjecture. A review of contemporary dialects of Cantonese in the Guangdong Province shows that Gaoming, south-west of Guangzhou and north-east of | 77 Chinese Pidgin English pronouns revisited

Macau (R. Bauer, personal communication) is the only a single instance where the character 米 is pronounced anything like the English ‘me’. The character is also pronounced ‘mi’ in Mandarin, but Mandarin pronunciations have not otherwise been a feature of these sources. Another possible source of confusion is the fact that the characters for mi 未 and mai 米 are superficially similar in shape. The method of printing these booklets probably by wooden blocks, necessitating the carving of a mirror image of the desired character may also have meant that the possibility of error may have been quite high. It could conceivably have happened that one of the manuals with a wide distribution accidentally represented the pronoun as 米, or that the character was badly printed in a way to make the identity ambiguous.

Nevertheless, the two versions of The common language of the red-haired foreigners that have come to light show the character, which is unequivocal, 味. This character is pronounced meih in contemporary Cantonese and mi in 18th-century Cantonese. This contrasts with the Instructor data, where the character 未, with a similar pronunciation, is used. The ‘mouth’ radical could also be a clue to a different pronunciation. Although the form 味 is a character meaning taste, characters with the mouth radical were widely used for special pronunciations, and this could have been the situation here. However, there would seem to be no need for a special character in this case, as the sounds ‘me’ and ‘my’ can both be adequately conveyed by the standard characters 未 and 米.

Apart from this, two possible clues from Cantonese could be cited. Since Cantonese has a single form for subject, object and possessive pronouns, there could have been substrate pressure to settle on a single form. If for some reason in the 1830s the form most often heard happened to be ‘my’, this could have played a part. ‘My’ could have been the form heard not only in the English ‘my’, but also the possessive ‘mine’ as the syllable-final sequences ‘ain’ or ‘aain’ are not permissible in Cantonese, and the final consonant would typically not be heard. Opposed to this suggestion is the fact that prior to 1830, ‘I’ or ‘me’ were the most attested forms.

Conclusion

The data collected show that a wide variety of pronominal forms occurred, but that instead of a stable paradigm there were considerable changes of emphasis over time. English and Chinese sources show some differences, with one surprising finding being the extent of differentiation of subject and object forms in the Instructor data. The question of the adoption of ‘my’ as the generic first person form with steadily increasing percentages from the 1830s onwards remains a mystery, although the timing strongly suggests that written forms played a part. There is also a need for caution in generalising from the Instructor data. Tong proves to have been an exceptionally gifted observer with sophisticated linguistic insights considering the information available to him. It is thus possible that forms appearing in the Instructor may not have been the same as those used by the average Chinese in the street.

*otes 1 I am grateful to Philip Baker and Stephen Matthews for comments on an earlier draft of this paper. 2 The Mandarin pronunciation is given here, but Cantonese speakers usually pronounce these characters according to Cantonese pronunciation: 我 ngóh , 你 néih , 他 tā , 們 mùhn and 的 dīk . 3 The Yale Romanisation is used to represent Cantonese here, with acute and grave accents signifying rising and falling tones, and ‘h’ after the vowel indicating a low tone.

G. Smith | 78

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