Court dialect: Wo min puh tung teh ta kiang shim mo.
Canton dialect: Ngo ’m hiu kü kong măt yé.
The rice contains sand in it.
Court dialect: Na ko mí yu sha tsz’.
Canton dialect: Ko tik mai yau sha tsoi noi.
None of the provincial patois differ so much from the kwan hwa, and afford so many peculiarities, as those spoken in the province of Fuhkien and eastern portions of Kwangtung. All of them are nasal, and, compared with those spoken elsewhere, harsh and rough. They have a large number of unwritten sounds, and so supply the lack; the same character often has one sound when read and another when spoken; all of them are in common use. This curious feature obliges the foreigner to learn two parallel languages when studying this dialect, so intimate and yet so distinct are the two. The difference between them will be more apparent by quoting a sentence: “He first performed that which was difficult, and afterward imitated what was easier.” The corresponding words of the colloquial are placed underneath the reading sounds.
| Sien | k’í | su | chí | sé | lan, | jí | ho | k’í | hau | chí | sé | tek. |
| Tai seng | chó í é | su | é | sé | oh, | jí | tui au | k’wna í é | hau | giem é | sé | tit tióh. |
The changes from one into the other are exceedingly various both in sound and idiom. Thus, bien chien, ‘before one’s face,’ becomes bin chan when spoken; while in the phrase cheng jit, ‘a former day,’ the same word chien becomes cheng and not chan; bòé chu, ‘pupil of the eye,’ becomes ang a; sit hwan, ‘to eat rice,’ becomes chiah puin. Their dialect, not less than their trafficking spirit, point out the Amoy people wherever they are met, and as they are usually found along the whole coast and in the Archipelago, and are not understood except by their provincial compatriots, they everywhere clan together and form separate communities. Dr. Medhurst published a dictionary of the Changchau dialect, in which the sounds of the characters are given as they are read. Dr. C. Douglas has gathered a great vocabulary of words and phrases used in the Amoy colloquial, in which he has attempted to reduce everything to the Romanized system of writing, and omitted all the characters.
The dialects of Fuhchau, Swatow, and Canton have been similarly investigated by Protestant missionaries. Messrs. Maclay and Baldwin have taken the former in hand, and their work leaves very little to be desired for the elucidation of that speech. Goddard’s vocabulary of the Swatow has no examples; and Williams’ Tonic Dictionary of the Canton dialect gave no characters with the examples. This deficiency was made up in Lobscheid’s rearrangement of it under the radicals.
The extent to which the dialects are used has not been ascertained, nor the degree of modification each undergoes in those parts where it is spoken; for villagers within a few miles, although able to understand each other perfectly, still give different sounds to a few characters, and have a few local phrases, enough to distinguish their several inhabitants, while towns one or two hundred miles apart are still more unlike. For instance, the citizen of Canton always says shui for water, and tsz’ for child, but the native of Macao says sui and chí for these two words; and if his life depended upon his uttering them as they are spoken in Canton, they would prove a shibboleth which he could not possibly enunciate. Strong peculiarities of speech also exist in the villages between Canton and Macao which are found in neither of those places. Yet whatever sound they give to a character it has the same tone, and a Chinese would be much less surprised to hear water called ♯chwui, than he would to hear it called ♭shui in the lower even tone, instead of its proper ascending tone. The tones really approach vowels in their nature more than mere musical inflections; and it is by their nice discrimination, that the people are able to understand each other with less difficulty than we might suppose amidst such a jargon of vocables.