Journal 2

One of the main uses of my time this week was spent finishing up my study of the Qin-Han sources and then the second use of my time was researching the possible Cantonese sources.

I spent most of the Qin-Han time looking through the book Chinese Writing by Qiu Xigui. The book chronicles the evolution of the Chinese script. The book has 107 scanned artifacts and sources from which I will be drawing a large part of my analysis.

Thursday I received the 7 volume set of Jia Gu Wen He Ji (the standard work on the Chinese oracle bones). Each book contains several thousand scanned images of oracle bones and their fragments. I spent several hours and was able to look through one thousand of the images. Out of that thousand I was able to find a few that were a high enough quality for the average person to recognize the basic shapes. I am still not sure if I will need to use these sources, but I will have the collection until March, long enough for me to make a decision.

I did much research on newspapers in Hong Kong, and chose as one of my main sources the Apple Daily newspaper. Many of the newspapers are very pro-Beijing and would therefore not give a clear picture of the Cantonese vernacular language in use. The Apple Daily is a more Western style newspaper and is conservative. All of the bigger and more prestigious newspapers are trying to reach a larger audience and many of them are trying to gain favor with mainland China. I was able to find upwards of 5 newspaper articles that have at least some use of Cantonese characters.

On top of looking at the newspapers, I was able to spend some time reading through Cantonese as a Written Language: The Growth of a Written Chinese Vernacular by Don Snow. The book is full of informative charts and transcripts of formal and more informal radio shows showing their use of Cantonese Characters. After analyzing the transcripts in paragraph form, he show charts about what it means. Both of these resources can work with paper to provide some of the background information for the Cantonese Vernacular section. 

I also did searches on Google to find blogs of people from Hong Kong. My technique for searching was to add a Cantonese character to my search terms. Although this guaranteed finding a blog that was using Cantonese characters it eliminated more formal blogs that, just like the newspapers above, want to reach a large audience. The blogs that I did use are have common characteristics, many of them code-switch by adding random English words (common in Hong Kong speech as well), and are not any more formal than a Facebook post. It has been harder than I thought to track the use of these characters because anybody that has any voice will be writing more formally. As I finish up my search I plan to look for more revolutionary sources, people not afraid to write using the Cantonese characters.

This next week I will finish up my look at Cantonese and then organize all of the sources to start to prepare an outline for my paper.