So this is the story of how our Cantonese Grammar came to be. The second edition remedies this shortcoming by including Chinese characters for all the example sentences, as requested by many readers of the first edition of the Grammar. At the time, including Chinese characters would have been technically challenging and prohibitively expensive.
It was followed by Basic Cantonese (1999) and Intermediate Cantonese (2000). The first edition was completed back at USC where Stephen was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in 1993-94. Simon Bell at Routledge commissioned the book. Since there was no grammar available in English, even a sketch grammar would be an original contribution: so why not write one? Stephen and Virginia then proposed a grammar to Croom Helm which in the meantime had been taken over by Routledge. He began to make notes to organize his observations on the structure of Cantonese, and soon envisaged developing them into a grammar book. While such textbooks included notes on grammatical points, the lack of a systematic grammar to refer to was a recurrent source of frustration. In his early days in Hong Kong, Stephen studied Cantonese from phrasebooks and textbooks, particularly those produced by Sidney Lau in the 1960s. They were married in Hong Kong in December 1990, with wedding receptions at the former Regent Hotel in Tsimshatsui and at Beth’s in Southampton, England. Virginia was recruited by the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a year later Stephen joined the University of Hong Kong. In summer 1989 they came to Hong Kong and became engaged. They first conversed in English and in basic Mandarin, which Stephen was learning from his Chinese roommates, and later switched to Cantonese while visiting Virginia’s friends and relatives in San Francisco and Vancouver. He specialized in language typology and she in language acquisition. Virginia, born and raised in Hong Kong, grew up speaking Cantonese and acquired English as a second language.
Why did he come to Hong Kong? He met Virginia (his future wife and co-author) in 1986 while studying for the PhD in Linguistics at the University of Southern California (USC).
SIDNEY LAU CANTONESE HOW TO
Background to Cantonese: A Comprehensive GrammarĬan you imagine what it’s like to arrive in Hong Kong not being able to understand and speak Cantonese? On his arrival in Hong Kong in 1990, Stephen, the first author, felt the same sense of being lost as most foreigners do, not knowing how to speak the language of the community.īorn and raised in the UK, Stephen read Modern and Medieval Languages at Cambridge.
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