Cantoromanization

>
> Try this:
>
> http://www.fi.muni.cz/usr/wong/teaching/chinese/notes/node15.html
>
> I just found this on a quick Google search and it has almost exactly the
> same information as what's printed in his dictionary (saving me lots of
> typing). The forward of his dictionary states that he worked for the HK
> government, so I guess it's no big secret why it's tied in to HK street
> signs. Keep in mind that HK was a vestige of Empire, so when they say
things
> like: "aap" sounds like the "arp" in "harp", it's Received Pronunciation.
> The "u" finals are also a little funky (eg: "sun" sounds to me more like
> /sYn/ than /s@n/ (as one might infer from the "sounds like the "on" in
> "nation" explanation)).
Oh ye gods... I'm a native speaker of Cantonese and I think that his
"Anglophone descriptions" of the sounds (as similar things have been
described before on this list :) are pretty bad. I found a phonology of
Cantonese in the IPA handbook which is quite good. So for those who wish to
know, it lists the vowels thusly:

/i/, /y/, /E/ /oe (that darn ligature)/, /a/ /O/ /u/ /I/ /o- (o with line
through middle)/ /A (a inverted)/ /U/

And the diphthongs thusly:

/ai/ /Ai/ /au/ /Au/ /ei/ /Eu/ /o-y/ /Oi/ /ui/ /iu/ /oU/

And the tones thusly:

55, 33, 22, 11, 35, 13

Still, as a layman transcription, the transcriptions don't look too awful,
unlike the Teach Yourself (Baker & Ho) romanisation, which is functional but
like looking at a piece of burnt toast:

Ngró yhat gin-dóu kréui, kréui jrau jáu-jó laak.

Imperative


> You'll need software to see what characters they're
> talking about, if you care. He uses numbers after the characters to mark
> tones (which you wouldn't see on a traffic sign, natch); I just use my own
> diacritics when taking notes. And I compress tone 1 and tone 7, but we've
> had that discussion before.
Tone 7?

> But hey, aside from all that, it's great!
> Anyhoo, may I assume that if you have the Li and Thompson, you have the
> Routledge Cantonese grammar by Matthews and Yip? I prefer Lau's
romanization
> quantum leaps over theirs.
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> Kou

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