The Chinese and English Instructor, compiled by T‘ong Ting-kü and published in Canton in 1862, is an English teaching material that utilized many newly-created Chinese characters to phonetically express the pronunciations of English words which were difficult to express with pre-existing Cantonese sounds. These characters featured an existing glyph and a pseudo radical ‘mouth’ 口, such as, 呷, composed of 甲 and 口. The explanatory notes at the beginning of this book listed many such characters. This study investigates the phonological effects of the addition of this component, focusing on the newly-created characters with the mid front unrounded vowel /e/ as their main vowel. The results showed that the values of certain parts of the syllable changed by regularly adding the pseudo radical ‘mouth’ to the existing glyph. It was observed that besides the vowel shift occurring in the main vowel in almost all groups, tone alternation occurred in most groups as well.

This paper scrutinizes the consonant alternations of Chinese Pidgin English in The Chinese and English Instructor(1862) that has been known as the representative text of CPE. The Chinese and English Instructor was written by Tong Ting-shu who was a comprador of Guangdong province, and composed of six volumes. Particularly, a part of volume 4 and a total of volume 6 consisted of CPE phrases or sentences. Therefore two volumes are very important for analyzing phonology, morphology and syntax of CPE. The CPE had been used primarily in Chinese southeastern coast from the early 19th century to the beginning of 20th century, and is a representative pidgin as a mixture of Cantonese and English. In CPE many consonants are replaced to others: from a fricative to a plosive and consonants cluster simplification etc. In The Chinese and English Instructor, particularly, we can see several consonants alternation. Firstly, [v] replaced [f], [w], and [p]/∅. Cantonese dose not have the [v] sound, so it changed to other consonants. Secondly, English plosives replaced aspirated voiceless plosives or unaspirated voiceless plosives because of the phonological system of Cantonese. However, this alternation is inconsistent and very complicated. Thirdly, [š] replaced the [s] sound in the condition that some vowels come after [š] or under the last syllable. But this vowel always replaced [syu] under some conditions. Fourthly, all of [θ] and [ð] sounds replaced [d], but only in the case ‘thisee’ and ‘the’ [ð] replaced [l].