Tide of change
Rupert Chan resembles King Canute in his valiant attempt to man the defences against the tide of linguistic change in Hong Kong ('Linguistic paths', December 7).
To appreciate this, we need look no further than research conducted by local phonologists, who have responded to the substitution of 'n' with 'l' at the beginning of Cantonese words by proposing that the letters are allophones of a single sound, which might be called 'n/l'. This description reflects the fact that the variation between the sounds is not linguistically distinctive, that no change of meaning is involved.
In English, 'n' and 'l' are separate sounds, not allophones, so if Mr Chan did indeed say 'Low lews is good lews,' I would probably hear it as 'Low loos is good loos' and take it to indicate a convenience.
Mr Chan suggests that if you asked a taxi driver to take you to 'Lung Cheung Dou' (instead of 'Nung Cheung Dou') you would never get to your intended destination of Farm Road. You would instead be taken to Lung Cheung Road in Wong Tai Sin.
Two points: first, locals would simply differentiate the two roads by adding the locale, thus 'Wong Tai Sin Lung Cheung Dou' and 'To Kwa Wan Lung Cheung Dou.' Second, and most telling, the road in To Kwa Wan is actually named 'Lung Po Dou' in Cantonese (Farm Road in English).
It would seem that whoever names streets in Hong Kong was aware of the potential confusion of having two roads with the same pronunciation. It would seem they also understood a thing or two about sociolinguistic change.
