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From: wing@pegasus.com (Wing Ng)
Subject: Re: Cantonese: how to say "quiet"?
Organization: Pegasus Information Systems
Message-ID: <DoEBDG.8MG@pegasus.com>
References: <4icuki$ono@news.ccit.arizona.edu> <4idr0g$n5t@netaxs.com>
Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 05:03:16 GMT
Lines: 43

In article <4idr0g$n5t@netaxs.com>, Wing Luk <wingluk@netaxs.com> wrote:
>Hung J Lu (hlu@bonaire.ccit.arizona.edu) wrote:
>: I know, sounds like a contradiction, Cantonese and
>: quiet just don't seem to blend well. :-)
>
>May be you are right. But cantonese may have to come second after Fuzhouese.
>
>: 
>: Jokes aside, a favor again. Is there any word in
>: Cantonese meaning "quiet" that sounds like <diam>?
>
>The cantonese for quiet is "jing", like its mandarin equivalent.
>I can't think of any equivalent which is even remotely sounding
>like "Diarm". The colloquial "jing ying ying" is equivalent to the 
>mandarin "jing xiu xiu".
>
>: (I wish I had an English-Cantonese dictionary!)
>: 

While I can't think of any non-sinitic word for quiet in
Cantonese, there are many well documented non-sinitc
words, one of them is "am", meaning "comfort [a baby]
to make it go to sleep", and many others.

Wing

>: In Hoklo: <diarm>, <diarm'diarm>
>: In Hakka: <diam>, <diam diam>
>: In Bahasa Malaysia and Bahasa Indonesia: <diam>, <diam diam>
>: In reconstructed proto-Austronesian: <dem dem>
>: 
>: A linguist includes Vietnamese <dde^m>, meaning "night", as
>: a cognate. There is probably some deeper reason for that.
>: 
>
>The cantonese for night is "ye", again, exactly like its
>mandarin equivalent. But the colloquial cantonese for night is "ye wan", 
>whereas in mandarin it is "wan shang".
>
>Cantonese in fact is a lot closer to mandarin than the Fujian dialects. 
>


