100 years old scroll - What dialect is it? Help me learn...

[Daryn]

I have dozens of scholarly scroll passed down from my grandfather. I need to know what dialect should the text be read in. I had several of my friends who were born in China look at it. They say the text is in traditional Chinese. My friends said it was choppy to read in Mandarin, but Cantonese felt smooth and natural. So my question is what written system should I learn and what dialect should I focus on to help read these scrolls.

I can't ask my grandfather. He passed away.

It's a little worn out:

[skylee]

Using Google and baidu, I could only find three websites with such texts, and all of them are related to the ethnic group 瑤族.

http://www.yaozu.net/article-4302-1.html

http://tieba.baidu.com/p/1898238008?pn=0&

http://www.56china.com/bbs/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=37329

What is shown in the photos look like some sort of copy books that children used to practise writing or write down what had been taught. There are some words that are wrong (like in 有射自然香， the second character is obviously wrong as it should be 有麝自然香).

[Shelley]

I wouldn't call them scrolls, they are, as skylee said books, copy books kids use to learn.

[Daryn]

Yes. I meant **book**

It's teachings of Confucian and Taoism. If I continue learning Mandarin and traditional characters, then do you think I can read it?

[Lu]

It's certainly in traditional characters, and it looks to me like it's written in Classical Chinese.

[rezaf]

If you just want to learn this book you don't need to learn the whole language. 

Learning Chinese and then classical Chinese might take quite a few years but you can save yourself a lot of time and find someone who knows classical Chinese to teach you this text. It doesn't look like a very difficult one.