Most fluent foreign Cantonese speakers

[Ian_Lee]

Who are the most fluent foreign Cantonese speakers?

I guess they must be the South Asians -- Indians and Pakistani (I don't know about the Nepalese since most of them only mixed into the society after the dissolution of Gurkhas) in Hong Kong. In contrast, only a handful of British can speak fluent Cantonese even they have stayed there longer.

Many South Asians, especially the locally born, speak flawless Cantonese.

I guess they speak Hindi or Bengali or whatever dialect at home, but amazingly they manage to speak perfect Cantonese outside their homes.

No wonder the triads are recruiting them as members in earnest.

[pazu]

Not necessarily, the watchdog of my mansion came from Pakistan and been in Hong KOng for 23 years, I had great difficulty to talk to him in any languages except Khuda Hafez.

AND, if they were born in Hong Kong, many would prefer themselves to be called local, not foreigners.

MOREOVER, I think the best Cantonese learners I've seen so far, are all from Thailand. I was wondering why all the time until I started learning some Thai, do you notice there are so many similiarities between the sounds of Cantonese and Thai?

[skylee]

Better call the man watchman.

I've heard that the Thai language has five tones. Is it correct?

[smithsgj]

Aren't the numbers 1-10 in Thai and Cantonese pretty similar too?

[pazu]

Skylee, but when I studied English I was told that watchdog is correct and has no derogatory implication...

And Smith, yes, they're very similar. Are there any links of Cantonese and Thai anyway?

[Quest]

There are links between Chinese and most of other east/southeast asian languages.

[Amdir_Flassion]

There are links. Like the word for chicken 'gai' is the same in both Thai and Canto.

[pazu]

Then any link between lotfan (Farsi/Persian: please) and Laofan (Mandarin: 勞煩)?

[smithsgj]

And 'lutfen' in Turkish. Dubious, but possible. Isn't Persian where "boli" or "hudie" (one of the few two-character morphemes anyway) came from?

> I was told that watchdog is correct and has no derogatory implication...

You were told wrong. It's either some sort of official body, or it's a dog. Not a person.

[Quest]

Or security guard?

[roddy]

You can't use watchdog to mean a security guard. Not if you want to keep all your teeth.

Roddy

[Quest]

watchdog 看门狗/门口狗

They look very ferocious when you are outside, once you get in, they lick you like every other puppy.

[pazu]

Oh really? but then what's this about?

Main Entry: 1watch·dog

Pronunciation: -"dog

Function: noun

Date: 1610

2 : one that guards against loss, waste, theft, or undesirable practices

(from Webster)

And how about:

UN Watchdog Starts Libya Atomic Inspections

Sun Dec 28,11:14 AM ET

TRIPOLI (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Sunday it had begun its inspections of Libya's nuclear facilities and visited four sites near the capital for the first time.

[smithsgj]

Actually I'm beginning to think that watchdog can't mean dog at all!

It could only refer to a person if he/she held an official government office -- protecting against wastage of resources or corruption, something like that, as Pazu's definition indicates. But normally it would refer to a government body not an individual. And certainly it can never mean a security guard or nightwatchman or anything like that.

[Ian_Lee]

Oh! I forget another group of fluent Cantonese speaker (but they shouldn't be classified as foreign) -- the Mecanese -- those pure or mixed blood Portuguese who have lived in Macau for generations.

[Guest pratyeka]

Thai is heavily influenced from the Yue group of languages that previously dominated southern China. Basically it's thought that the Thais moved south to China through Laos a long time ago, leaving their Dai (Yunnan), Lao (Laos) and various other siblings along the way.

[channamasala]

Linguists generally believe that Persian, Turkish - well, OK, I am not one to talk about those two - and Chinese are not related at all. It is very likely that Turkish (which is of course in the Turkic language family) and Persian (Semitic, I think, but cannot be sure, it may be Turkic as well) share the word either as a cognate - a word that came from the same source that is similar between two related languages (such as the Sanskrit "raja" and the Latin "regis" and the Sanskrit "deva" and Latin "deus") or borrowing - word that is taken from an unrelated language and adopted into another (such as "kung fu" and "kowtow" in English, or "pariah" and "kattamaran" which are used in English but come from the unrelated Tamil language). But the chances of either of them being true for Chinese are slim to none. Chinese is NOT related to either Persian or Turkish, so the only other possibility is a borrowing. Seems an odd word to borrow to me.

Uighur, on the other hand, is related to Turkish, it is a Turkic language. It has a lot of similarities with Urdu in Pakistan and even Hindi in India - which are basically the same language anyway but use different scripts and one is more "Indic" and one more "Arabicized") not because it is related but because all the similar words in those three languages were borrowed from the same source - Arabic, which is a Semitic language. This is a reason why Uighurs have a hard time learning Mandarin, their language is completely unrelated (that and they generally hate the Han Chinese, that has something to do with it too).

Southeast Asian languages (Lao, Thai, Vietnamese) on the other hand, are Sino-Tibetan, meaning that they actually ARE related to Mandarin, albeit distantly. It would not surprise me that they are closer to Cantonese, which is also of course in that family, seeing as Cantonese is, well, southern (even if the regions don't border each other). Look at the vocabulary of the Lao language - you'll see lots of similarities that can only come from being related. Most languages with tones also come from this family, although I am sure their are some tonal languages that are not Sino-Tibetan. Couldn't name them if you put a gun to my head, however.

[Quest]

Lao, Thai, and Vietnamese do not belong to the Sino-Tibetan family.

They are austroasiatic languages.

Sino-Tibetan really includes only Chinese, Tibetan, and Burmese.

[smithsgj]

> Couldn't name them if you put a gun to my head, however.

Over half the world's languages, including most African ones.

[channamasala]

That's not what I was taught in my linguistics classes (granted, I never took historical ling., which would have covered it more thoroughly). Please note that I am regurgitating only what I learned in class, but I specifically remember Lao and Thai being Sino-Tibetan. After being in Lao and Thailand, sure seems right to me. Suuure, a lot of the similar words could be borrowings, I mean, so much of Korean comes from Chinese but they are not related, but...eh...someone is wrong here, either my linguistics professor or the reply on this forum, and I'm not going to defend what I was taught on the chance that it actually was wrong.

By Chinese I assume you mean "Mandarin, all those dialects of Mandarin in China/Taiwan, and Cantonese", right?