Journal 9

I was able to focus on writing this week. I continued to write about the Cantonese script. I focused on how the Cantonese script has become semi-standardized among its writers. Although many official government newspapers and communications steer clear of the Cantonese script, there are some newspapers that use it quite regularly. The specific characters used in the script sometimes vary, but they always follow the same basic rules. The characters chosen for use will have the same pronunciation, but may just vary in the tone. One example of this is the Cantonese word for now ‘yi ga.’ The ‘ga’ character (家) has been constant, but the ‘yi’ character has taken several forms including 依 which is a high tone and 而 which is a low tone. It is also interesting to note that the ‘ga’ character 家 is the character for family in standard Chinese and also Cantonese; the context is what makes the difference between the meanings. Another interesting feature that I was able to write about was the fact that the ambiguity of Cantonese is what makes it difficult to understand and grasp. Generally, Chinese is made up of two character compound words; each character usually has the same meaning in order to make the intended meaning clear. Cantonese, however, in order to save on time will usually drop the second character, so the listen is, in effect, hearing one character words. Not only in speaking does this cause problems. Without the added context of a conversation, reading passages written in the Cantonese grammar structure adds to the confusion already present with a non-alphabetic script.

 My paper is starting to get to the final stage. I have added the title page, the abstract page, and the list of figures. Although I still have much work to do before the final product is ready, but most of the formatting is done. I am now just working on proofreading the sections that I have already written, adding transitions to the sections, and then writing new sections, where necessary.

 I have written one of the analysis sections, which I thought was going to be the bulk of my essay, but I found that my analysis was straight to the point, and did not take as many words as I expected. As of yet, I am not sure if this will hurt the length of my paper.

 Most of the time this week has been spent on going through the first half of the essay. I have been using the annotated bibliography entries as the base of the essay, so most of my time was spent changing tenses and substituting quotations for summaries. I also added many of my own examples to illustrate the points. Other than that, I was just making all of the information flow together as a logical essay.

 For this next week, mainly on Saturday, I will be finishing up my editing of the whole essay, as see which points need to be elaborated in order to avoid confusion.