Fossils from a Rural Past

Contents

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pp. vii-viii

Acknowledgements

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pp. ix-

First we wish to thank our mother, who has through the years tried to glean for us as many songs and rhymes as she could from her siblings and friends...

Introduction

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pp. 1-10

The songs discussed in this monograph were once popular in many towns and villages in Guangdong Province. We knew a few of them ourselves, having learned them from our mother, maternal grandmother and other...

The Linguistic Context

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pp. 11-26

The second thing we did with our collected songs was to analyse their structure and style. They are classified into four categories in terms of their meaning and function, although there is a great deal of overlap...

The Non-linguistic Context

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pp. 27-33

A good number of English nursery rhymes like 'Three Blind Mice' or 'Little Jack Horner' refer in a veiled fashion to political events, using the form as a cover. This technique is similar to that employed by Theocritus and others after him when they made use of the allegorical pastoral...

Conclusion

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pp. 33-34

Hockett has written, 'In an illiterate society a story or other literary work will survive only as long as it continues to be learnt by at least one person in each generation'.* In the more urban parts of Hong Kong, for many years the songs owed their survival mainly to two factors....

Appendix: The Cantonese songs and their translations in English

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pp. 35-75