Re: Cantonal spelling, take 3

Jän-Køs Larsä Giirtingäär wrote:

> erm... no offense...

None taken.  I'm just playing with things I don't fully understand.

> but as a native speaker of cantonese i think i
> should finally say something: The 3 takes look horrible. Don't EVER
> combine 2 words together... it's not done in cantonese,

Fair enough.

> or chinese for
> that matter... there is no break in speech between terms nor there is a
> break when it's written.

HYPY definitely does divide words (ci2) with spaces and run together
zi4 that belong to the same ci2:  Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo, not
normally Zhong Hua Ren Min Gong He Guo, except in the usage of fanatical
Western librarians :-).  Of course in hanzi writing there are no spaces.

> i'm all for using IPA.

IPA is simply not a practical orthography.

> simply use the whatever convention you use to
> represent IPA symbols and put the tone number behind it.

Two problems: there are two different sets of tone numbers (Cantonese-
specific and interdialectal -- you seem to be using the latter), and the
whole point of tonal spellings is to encode tones with *letters*,
not numbers of diacritics, which have a distressing tendency to
get lost in (human) transmission.

> there is no
> need to indicate vowel length, as it is not a factor in cantonese.

All my sources say that a vs aa and u vs uu (written oo in Sidney Lau)
is indeed a phonemic difference.  Yue is unique among the Sinitic
languages in having phonemic vowel length (probably a holdover from
the Dai substrate).

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