粤语方言的历史研究——读《麦仕治广州俗话〈书经〉解义》

A historical study of the Yue dialect:The Book of Documents Translated into Colloquial Cantonese by Mo Shizhi

我曾大力提倡利用十九世纪的资料研究粤语的历史，并以广州话为例，举出一些早期语法的特点，其中包括否定可能式和定语结构。当时手头的资料，绝大部分是西洋传教士编写的课本、语汇、圣经翻译之类，广州人自己编的资料差不多没有。最近十分幸运，找到一本名为《麦仕治广州俗话<书经>解义》的书，是南海师山麦仕治所编译。拿来跟同时代的其他资料对比，发觉共通之处虽多，但亦各有千秋。

The Book of Documents Translated into Colloquial Cantonese by Mo Shizhi is an invaluable document for the study of the history of the Yue dialect in the C19.While it shares many syntactic and lexical features of documents of the same period,there are several such features not found in other documents and others that furnish a missing link in understanding the history of Cantonese.This 185-page volume was written by Mo Shizhi of the Nanhai county and published in the Guisi year (probably 1893) of the last century with the purpose of explicating in the colloquial language the difficult classical text of the Book of Documents,so that youths and females and males who were minimally literate could comprehend this text on their own.Indeed,this volume shows at least as colloquial a style as,if not more so than,texts compiled in the same period.On the other hand,just like its contemporaneous texts,it also contains literary elements.This paper will discuss the outstanding features of the lexicon,the word formation as well as the syntax of this volume,including the duplicative use of synonymous lexical expressions,the reduplication of stative verbs to indicate intensive degree,the rich array of markers used in the double-object construction,and the form of the attributive structure.