【讀者分享🇭🇰🇬🇧】回應卿姐：點解唔比中英夾雜？語言學進化，就係咁樣

日前和卿姐做了一個訪問，她一如以往努力糾正我說話中英夾雜的「壞習慣」，然後一位熱心讀者傳來以下分享。簡單而言，他認為從語言學的角度，中文採用的語素文字 (logographic，或廣義的方塊字) 系統有很多內容不能表達，而不少語言都嘗試混合語素文字與拉丁語系，去填補先天不足。這方面，日文自然是最好的例子，基本上是一個漢字和拉丁語系在地化的大雜燴。新加坡逐漸從英文+不同中文方言+馬拉文等演變出自己的「Singlish」 ，也是類似例子，除了實際用途，這也是建構身份認同的重要一環。以下是他的分享：

For those of you who might be interested in ingesting more about the Chinese language groups (spoken), this is a very good summary. 

▶️ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY0AMmLuiqk

There were researches about that some of those language groups might have their own writing script in history but had been “assimilated” into the Hanzi logographic writing system. And there were debates on whether some of the language groups, especially Wu around the Yangtze River Delta, should actually make use of syllabaries supplementarily to signify some of their words and expressions when the Hanzi scripts failed to signify them properly (which would be like Japanese, using both logographic “Kanji” borrowed from Hanzi and syllabic kana). 

Some radicals even advocated abandoning the logographic system and to adopt Latin alphabets once and for all.

Well, we people from Hong Kong have actually partially solved that problem by mixing quite a lot of English into our communication, especially when we have found concepts hard to express in Cantonese. The older generation does not like it and think that it is not respectful for the traditions. But I think that it is just a natural linguistic phenomenon in a place so deeply entrenched in a mixed oriental and western cultural environment. 

Singaporeans and Malaysian Chinese are actually doing the same also. Sometimes we are even using English in a reversed way and created “Chinglish” or “Singlish” in the process, too.

You can tell that to Emily Lau the second paragraph and she should stop bitching about mixing English with Cantonese when we talk. It is just a more eclectic way of communication comparing to the Japanese way of using both logographic and syllabic kana.