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Robert S. Bauer is honorary linguistics professor at the University of Hong Kong and formerly professor of Chinese linguistics at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Victor H. Mair is professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania.
Nearly two decades in the making, this one-way dictionary has many special features, the most interesting of which are the notes on social status of words and their cultural, historical, and political connotations. The introduction explains the special connection between Cantonese and Hong Kong. Also presented are the five processes and twelve basic principles of the written language. The inclusion of example sentences in colloquial Cantonese make the volume particularly practical for students. . . . Essential.--L. K. Miller, formerly, Western Kentucky University Libraries CHOICE, 59:4 (December 2021) Robert Bauer has devoted much of his career to studying Hong Kong Cantonese--with its colorful expressions and ingenious written characters--at the grass-roots level, making him uniquely qualified to produce this much-anticipated work. Focusing on distinctively Cantonese expressions, including loan words, idioms, and slang, and illustrated with representative examples of usage, this dictionary will be a standard reference for all students of Cantonese language and culture.--Stephen Matthews, Hong Kong University Robert Bauer has produced an amazingly comprehensive and wonderfully accurate dictionary of the Cantonese language as currently spoken in Hong Kong. In fact, it is more than a dictionary: It is a veritable thesaurus of cultural and historical information on Hong Kong language and society unavailable elsewhere and will surely attract the growing number of Hong Kong residents and others who follow the heated debates surrounding Hong Kong Cantonese and its future. English speakers who want to understand and speak Cantonese will find their needs more than met by Bauer's dictionary. Because it follows the ABC Chinese Dictionary Series' alphabetic principle, users can look up a word once they know its pronunciation and spelling in the Jyut Ping romanization system. Similarly, a Cantonese--or Mandarin--speaker who wants to check a Cantonese phrase or look for an English translation needs only to know its Jyut Ping spelling.--James E. Dew, University of Michigan
