Writing Cantonese with Latin Script: Jyutping (draft)Author: 小德For centuries, people have invented various systems to write Cantonese with the Latin alphabet (a, b, c...). Such systems are called "romanizations". The results were kind of ok and some are still used (like the "Yale"-system). (Cynics might say that old romanization systems are normally used by tenured academics who are just too lazy to learn a new one...) Finally, in 1993, the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK) developed a system that combined the best features of its predecessors and was easy to use: "The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme." (Those people at the LSHK really, really love their baby: "It is multifunctional, systematic, user-friendly, compatible with all possible modern Cantonese sounds, and solely based on alphanumeric characters without any diacritics and strange symbols." [http://www.lshk.org/cantonese.php]) Yes, "The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme" is far too long and normally everybody uses the alternative "Jyutping" (粵拼). The name Jyutping is shorthand and consists of the first Chinese characters of the terms jyut jyu (粵語, meaning "Cantonese") and ping jam (拼音 "phonetic alphabet"). (Note: The "j" used by this romanization system is the "j" used by IPA [International Phonetic Alphabet], which is equivalent to the "y" used by English speakers or most Chinese romanization systems.) So how does this wonderful new system work? (Note: The following is not intended to be a waterproof academic description, but just a practical guide for the beginner.) The basic building blocks for Cantonese are the sounds of single Chinese characters (Hanzi). These sounds are called "phonemes". For example: "Jyutping" is composed of two phonemes "jyut" and "ping". Every "phoneme" can (apart from some exceptions) be further divided into 3 sub-components. 1) Initials or Onsets (聲母) ["sound mother"] 2) Nuclei (韻腹) ["syllabic belly"] 3) Finals or Codas (韻尾) ["syllabic tail"] Let's look at our example: "jyut" can be divided into "j"+"yu"+"t". "j" = Initial "yu" = Nuclei "t" = Coda And here the exceptions: 4) Syllabic nasals (鼻音單獨成韻) |