FYI: New Language Resources for Research on Cantonese

Author:	Andy Chin
Linguistic Field(s):	Historical Linguistics Text/Corpus Linguistics
Subject Language(s):	Chinese, Yue
FYI Body:	The Research Centre on Linguistics and Language Information Sciences (http://www.rclis.ied.edu.hk) at the Hong Kong Institute of Education has recently released two new online Cantonese corpora. 1. A Linguistic Corpus of Mid-20th Century Hong Kong Cantonese (http://hkcc.livac.org/) The construction of this corpus aims to supply new and authentic natural language data for studying the historical development of Cantonese in the last 50 years. 21 selected Cantonese movies produced between 1950 and 1960 were transcribed (in Chinese characters). Users can search the corpus with Chinese characters or words, Cantonese pronunciations as well as other attributes, such as production years of movies, genders and names of speakers. 2. Cantonese Dialogues (1850) Online Version (http://www.livac.org/hobson/) The Cantonese Dialogues, compiled by Dr. Benjamin Hobson (1816- 1873) in 1850, is an introductory text on Cantonese produced for missionaries working in Southern China, and is in an interesting didactic format, which is also useful for research into pragmatics. It contains a wide range of topics associated with Chinese culture, religion, and social life, such as religious rituals, spirits and demons, language of China, education system of China, Chinese government, provincial government, medical profession, marriage, and funeral rituals. In addition to linguistic research, these two corpora are also useful for studying the language and culture of the periods concerned, and the relationship between them. Other than Mandarin, Cantonese is a dialect with rare authentic colloquial materials back for nearly 200 years.