レッグ編Lexilogusに記される粤語音の表記と体系

A Lexilogus of the English, Malay, and Chinese Languages: Comprehending the Vernacular Idioms of the Last in the Hok-keen and Canton Dialects was compiled by James Legge (1815-1897) of the London Missionary Society in Malacca, who later became one of the most famous Sinologists of the nineteenth century. This work, a collection of model sentences in English, Malay, written Chinese, Southern Min, and Cantonese, was printed at the Anglo-Chinese College Press in 1841. The existing literature has paid scant attention to this historical text, even though Lexilogus provides an accurate picture of the Cantonese spoken in a Canton suburb up to the late 1830s. In this paper, we examine the Romanized transcription for Cantonese pronunciation in Lexilogus and analyze the phonological system from a synchronic perspective with respect to the initials and rimes. The investigations carried out by linguists in the last decade have extended our knowledge of Cantonese in the pre-World War II period and our analysis will further elucidate this subject. This paper demonstrates that the Romanized transcription used in Lexilogus does not exactly correspond to the orthography used in Bridgman's A Chinese Chrestomathy in the Canton Dialect. The Romanized transcription used in Lexilogus was partly arranged by Samuel Brown, who formulated the Cantonese pronunciation system. His devices capture the phonetic features of Cantonese, which the orthography used by Bridgman could not represented. For example, we discover that the vowels e and o were deliberately used to represent the mid vowels of the short duration that preceded the stop final consonants -p, -t and -k in Lexilogus. Further, our analysis shows that ò was indeed used to represent a raised mid back rounded vowel that preceded the bilabial or alveolar final consonants