Morphological Typology: Cantonese
My adopted language, Cantonese, is an analytic language. This means that it does not use affixes. Because of this, things that would be conveyed in other language using inflectional or derivational morphemes (tense, number, case, gender, etc.) are instead communicated using separate words or inferred from context. In Cantonese, as in other analytic languages, word order is epecially imporant to avoid ambiguity.
Examples
我唔識講粵語。 (Ngo5 m4 sik1 gong2 jyut6 jyu5.)
“I cannot speak Cantonese.”
This sentence can very easily be broken up into its consituent words. Words in cantonese are often one or two syllables, each represented by a single character.
- 我 (Ngo5)
- Part of Speech: Pronoun
- Meaning: I / me
- 唔 (m4)
- Part of Speech: Adverb
- Meaning: Not / no
- 識 (sik1)
- Part of Speech: Verb
- Meaning: To know / to be able to
- 講 (gong2)
- Part of Speech: Verb
- Meaning: To speak / to talk
- 粵語 (jyut6 jyu5)
- Part of Speech: Noun
- Meaning: Cantonese (the Cantonese language)
- Note: this is a compound word from the two words 粵 “Guangdong” and 語 “dialect/language.”
If we simply translate every word directly into English without changing the word order, we get “I (am) not able (to) speak Cantonese (i.e. Guangdong-language).”
我唔識過講粵語。 (Ngo5 m4 sik1 gwo3 gong2 jyut6 jyu5.)
“I could not speak Cantonese.”
Notice that this sentence is almost identical to the one above except for a single character. This is a particle that occurs right after a verb to denote that it happened in the past.
- 過 (gwo3)
- Part of Speech: Verb (particle)
- Meaning: (indicates completion or past action)
佢畀咗佢哋兩個杯。 (Keoi5 bei2 zo2 keoi5 dei6 loeng5 go3 bui1.)
“She gave them two cups.”
Cantonese does not use gendered pronouns, so 佢 could mean he, she, or singular they. Because the gender is not specified, it must be inferred from previous context. “Them” is pluralized using the particle 哋 rather than an affix. Also, the noun 杯 “cup” is not explicitly plural, but it can be inferred to be plural based on the number given.
- 佢 (Keoi5)
- Part of Speech: Pronoun
- Meaning: He / she / they
- 畀 (bei2)
- Part of Speech: Verb
- Meaning: To give
- 咗 (zo2)
- Part of Speech: Particle
- Meaning: (indicates completion of the action)
- 佢哋 (keoi5)
- Part of Speech: Pronoun
- Meaning: He / she / they
- 哋 (dei6)
- Part of Speech: particle
- Meaning:
- 兩個 (loeng5)
- Part of Speech: Number
- Meaning: Two
- 杯 (bui1)
- Part of Speech: Noun
- Meaning: Cup
If we again translate the words directly, we get the following: “She give [past] them [plural] two cup.”