The Chinese-English Instructor 英語集全 was published in Guangzhou in or around 1862. The main function of the book is teaching standard English. However, dialogues in 廣東番話 gwong2 dung1 faan1 waa2 ‘Canton foreign language’, that is what we known today as Chinese Pidgin English, are provided in volumes 4 and 6 of the book. The author, variously known as Tong King-Sing/Tong Ting-kü, and Tang Ting-Shu, came from a village of the Heung Shan district of Guangdong province He was educated at the Morrison Education Society School and became very successful in a variety of business enterprises. The data
presented here are transcribed based on the copy at the University of Hong Kong.
Transcription
The transcription provides the following information: four ‘tiers’ for each phrase as shown in the first example below:
(i) The Cantonese text as it is presented in the original book.
(ii)The standard English text as it is presented in the original book.
(iii) A representation of the pidgin in English orthography as used in English language sources.
(iv) The Chinese characters used to represent the equivalent phrase in pidgin presented as in the original as far as typography allows.
(v) The Chinese characters used to represent the equivalent phrase in pidgin presented as in the original as far as typography allows.
(vi) A transcription of the characters in (iv) as read in Cantonese, using the 粵拼 Jyutping romanisation (https://www.lshk.org/jyutping).