Written Chinese in the pre-modern Southern Chinese regions

[mr tin]

Having spent quite some time studying the benzi ?? for words peculiar to Southern Chinese dialects, I am interested to find out how formal and informal writing in Southern Chinese states (e.g. Guangdong ??, Fujian ??) during the pre-modern era (i.e. before the advent of the written vernacular baihuawen ??? and a spoken vernacular putonghua ??? in the early-20th century) was like. Prior to 1919, there was no such written or spoken vernacular standard, and dialects (especially the Southern Chinese dialects) were mutually-unintelligible. From what I gather, the only real means of communicating across such mutually-unintelligible dialects would have been via writing. Insofar as the grammar is concerned, I am guessing that it would have been primarily based on the Classical Chinese wenyanwen ??? model, with some mild intrusion of characteristics from the local dialect of the writers. I am curious to know how, and to what extent, such local effects were. But more importantly, what my question specifically refers to is the vocabulary employed in the writing. Prior to the advent of baihuawen ???, I would imagine that words from the Northern dialects’ lexicon (e.g. ? for ‘give’, ?? for ‘how’, ? for ‘this’, ? for ‘that’), would not yet have appeared in Southern Chinese writing (particularly informal writing). So, to give some really simple (if not entirely applicable) examples: 1. “Gun” or “rifle” in the Minnan ?? dialect is ? (pronounced “ch’?ng” in Minnan). This character for “gun” is rarely used in Modern Standard Chinese, now supplanted by ? (which originally meant “spear” or “lance”, but is now used for “gun”). My question is, supposing a 19th century Amoy native were to write to a colleague in Guangzhou regarding guns: • Would he have used the character ? for gun, or ?? • “Gun” in Guangzhou is ? “ch’eong”. If the Amoy writer had, in fact, used ? in his letter, would the Guangzhou reader, in all probability, have understood? • And had the Guangzhou reader now written a reply to the Amoy native, this time using ? for “gun”, would the Amoy native had understood it? 2. “To follow” in the Minnan dialect is ? (pronounced “t?” in Amoy and “t?i” in Zhangzhou). The usage of this word to mean “follow” is peculiar to the Minnan dialect. Would this word have been used by our hypothetical 19th century Minnan native writer, or would he have used something else (e.g. ?, ?, ?), such words being virtually non-existent (well, at least in the context of "to follow") in regular Minnan speech? In general, for the Southern dialects that did not enjoy the priviliege of having a written standard like Mandarin and Cantonese prior to the 20th Century, what was the grammar, vocabulary and style employed – be it formal or informal?