The origin of Cantonese

The Spring Festival in 2022 is coming. Watching the Spring Festival Evening on New Year's Eve today, a sketch caught my attention!

For Cantonese sketches, I checked the relevant origins of Cantonese!

Cantonese originated in the ancient country of Cangwu in Lingnan about 5000 years ago.

Cantonese, also known as Cantonese and Guangfu dialect, is commonly known as vernacular Chinese, and is called Tang dialect overseas. It is one of the seven dialects of Chinese tonal language and Chinese, belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family, and is also the mother tongue of Guangfu people of Han nationality.

Since ancient times, Guangdong and Guangxi have been connected by mountains and rivers and cultures. Until the split of Guangdong and Guangxi in the Song Dynasty, Cantonese was formed much earlier than in the Song Dynasty. Because of this, Cantonese is popular in Guangdong and Guangxi. Cangwu, an ancient country in Lingnan for about 5,000 years, is the birthplace of Lingnan culture and Pearl River culture, and also the birthplace of Cantonese. Cantonese, with nine tones and six tones, is a dialect with many ancient Chinese elements, which is a combination of Yayan in the Central Plains and Ancient Yue in Lingnan.

Cantonese not only retains a large number of ancient Chinese vocabulary and grammar, but also retains the pronunciation and tone of ancient Chinese, especially the entering tone. But now the popular Mandarin has no tone. The so-called "entering three tones" has been sent to three tones: flat, up and down. Because there is no entering tone, reading China's classical poems in Mandarin can't tell the difference between level tone, rhyme and rhyme. It is also very troublesome for people in Putonghua areas to write ancient poems. Cantonese speakers have this advantage, and their intonation is innate, so reading China's ancient poems in Cantonese is particularly attractive. In Hakka dialect and Chaoshan dialect, a large number of ancient Chinese, especially in the Middle Ages, are also preserved.