On a historical approach to Cantonese studies : a corpus-based contrastive analysis of the use of classifiers in historical and recent translations of the Four Gospels

Abstract

This study provides a statistical account and a contrastive study on the use of classifiers in historical Cantonese and contemporary Cantonese documents. We have conducted a statistical analysis of classifiers present in the Cantonese translations of the 1880s edition and the 2010 edition of the four canonical gospels in the Christian New Testament. 94 classifiers are observed in the 2010 edition, but only 80 are found in the 1880s edition. Our results show that while some classifiers have been used most regularly since the nineteenth century, for example, kɔ33個 (a general classifier), kin22件 ‘piece’, tʰiu11條 ‘strip’, tsɛk33隻 (mostly for counting animals and dolls), and ti55 的/啲, the frequency of some classifiers in the 2010 edition drops drastically as a result of lexical replacement; for example, tat33笪 (for counting fields) in place of fai33塊. We have also found that the reduction in frequency of reduplicated classifiers is a result of changes in translation strategy rather than a real reduction in usage in contemporary Cantonese.