xng wrote:
How can 物 be the correct character as it means 'thing, substance, creature' and not 'WHAT'.
Unless you're saying that in classical chinese dictionary, 物 means 'what' and the cantonese use 乜 because the tone has changed from the original tone of 物 ?
So you're saying that in cantonese, it should be 物人 instead of 乜人 ? So this is another one of those 'lost original character' in cantonese ?
No,
xng - I am not saying that it is one of the lost original characters.
Please allow me to quote two references:
1. 唐•趙璘 《因話錄•諧戲附》: "玄宗文黃幡綽: '是勿兒得人憐?' 對曰: '自家兒得人憐.'" (原注: 是勿兒, 猶言何兒也.)
2. 唐•段成式 《西陽雜俎》 卷四: "座上一妓, 獻杯整髮, 未嘗見手, 衆怪之. 有客被酒, 戲曰: '勿六指乎?' 乃強牽視."
In
《論粤方言詞本字考釋》,
陳伯煇 proposes that although
勿 was defined as an interrogative particle in the glossary above, the actual character is
物, and that it was likely due to a shift in tone for
物 over time, whereaupon
物's role as a noun was shifted to that of an interrogative particle. He draws a parallel between the old Mandarin
甚物 which eventually evolved to become
甚麼 when they partially-fused. Such fusion is not uncommon - as someone else has mentioned in another thread, the Hokkien
sia-miq/
sim-miq itself is a fusion from
是何物.
Believe me,
xng - I, too, would love a Uthopian linguistic world whereby
all root words in Hokkien can find their way back to actual meanings in Classical Chinese (if so, we would not even be having that discussion about Hokkien having She
畲 and Hmong roots in the other thread, would we?). The older Forumers here will bear witness to my fighting that corner for ages. But slowly, I have come to realise that it is not all cut-and-dried. We cannot expect to map
every word to a classical definition in the
說文解字 or the
康熙字典. You try finding the
correct Chinese character for a simple Hokkien word like
bue ('need to'/'want to') - scholars have done that one to death. The maxim
有字必有本, while partially applicable to Cantonese, cannot really apply 100% to Hokkien. I myself have pretty much given up the idealistic notion that Hokkien can be
correctly written
only using Chinese characters.
To be fair, even Mandarin has its fair share of
假借字 with current definitions that have nothing to do with their original classical meanings -
這 and
那 are my two favourite examples - we just don't happen to question them because we have taken them for granted as part of the current world of Modern Standard Chinese.