This is one of the reasons why I love Cantonese: 咩! (Meeh, wot? or what kind of…)
My theory: It started out as 乜嘢 (mat yeh, what thing. As in: 你飲乜嘢呀？Lei yam mat yeh ah? You drink what thing ah – what are you drinking?). A good Cantonese expression that Mandohooligans can’t understand, in speech or writing. And then (again this is my theory but I think a good’n:) it slowly compressed into one word: Meh (咩）taking the beginning from the mat and the end from the yeh.
And then MEH took on its own life, meaning ‘what kind of’ as in 你飲咩啤酒呀? (Lei yam meh beh jau ah? You drink what kind of beer?) But it created a conundrum. How to write it? Normally in Cantonese if a word doesn’t have its own character you just take a word that sounds identical or similar and slap a ‘mouth’ character (口）on it. Like 呀 (ah) that comes from the word 牙 (tooth). But there is no ‘meh’ sound in Cantonese. What did they do? Wrote it as ‘the sound of a goat’! (Or sheep.) 咩(meeeeeeh!) Goat falling off a mountain!
By the way, the above photo was taken on an excellent day in Inner Mongolia, hitch-hiking through the wilderness.
喂！ 你搵乜嘢呀！ (Wei! Lei wan mat yeh ah? Hey! What are you looking for?)
It seems to be that one of the biggest problems in Canto, especially for native English speakers, is word order. But that’s what you should pay the most attention to in my opinion. Look at the picture above, for example.
It’s so tempting, isn’t it, to say 水牛玩0係草原 （seui ao waan hai chou yuen) water cow play in field, because that’s what it would be in English. If, however, you can accept that Cantonese is not like English, half the battle is won.
It took me ages to work out why the word order is like it is, but once I had, it was a huge epiphany.
But of course!
Every sentence is like a film clip.
If you can visualise the story as it unfolds and say the words as they pop up in the story chronologically, then you will always get the right word order.
Take the buffalo. It’s about the buffalo, so of course you start with that. 水牛。But if you’d gone on with the sentence like in English, it would mean “The water buffalo is playing (with) (something called) In The Field. Whatever you put after “play,” is being played or played with. Also, it starts with the buffalo, it walks into the field, and only then can it start playing!
The sentence should be: 水牛0係草原玩。Water cow in field play.
Let’s say the same buffalo wanted to swing around for a beer at The Fat Pig bar in Wanchai at 7 tomorrow night . If you followed the English word order it would be all messed up. He would start drinking beer, then he would get to the bar, then starting to look around for Wanchai, after which it become the point in time when all this happened. Impossible.
But see the story in your head, (in garish technicolour) as it unfolds, and it becomes clear it must run like this:
水牛聽晚七點去灣仔肥豬吧飲啤酒。Seui ao teng man chat dim heui wan tsai fei jyu ba yam beh jau. (Water cow tomorrow night 7 o’clock go Wan Chai Fat Pig Bar drink beer.) It all happens in sequence!
Good one eh? Cantonese: Probably the most logical language around.
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