Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
visual-fonts.com
visual-fonts.com
It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection systems for language learners to automatically check the correctness of their pronunciations as they speak in real-time. This can be accomplished by using time-frequency analysis that detect its accuracy similar to these language pronunciation apps like ELSA speak for English [1][2].
[1]Time–frequency representation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time%E2%80%93frequency_represe...
[2] ELSA Speak:
The number embedded in the Jyutping pronunciation indicates the tone.
However, the automatic tonal detection is not as straightforward as it might seem due the tone sandhi (the tone change of the word/syllable depending on surrounding morphemes), and not all tonal languages have the tone sandhi. Cantonese, Teochew and Hokkien languages can have a pretty complex tone sandhi, though.
For Cantonese and Jyutping specifically, the tone sandhi is marked as, e.g., «faan4*2» which means that the standard pronunciation is «faan4» (the low falling tone) can change into «faan2» (the high rising tone) depending on the following morpheme. The tone sandhi does not have fixed rules and depends on each morpheme. Depending on the tonal language, the preceding morpheme can initiate a tone change, or it can be the following one. Certain tonal languages can have a complex tone sandhi that affects the tonal change not just in a single morpheme but it the rest of the morphemes that comprise a full word.
We would really be talking about a full contextual, semantics aware automated translator that applies the approriate tone sandhi on the contextual basis to give a Western reader the correct tone rendition in the transliteration.*
Tone sandhi is phonologically motivated, i.e., the tone changes arise from the pronunciation of the surrounding words, and are thus largely predictable. Cantonese changed tones, however, are generally lexically motivated, i.e., the changed tone is part of the realization of the word itself. Cantonese changed tones are thus more akin to Mandarin's erhua phenomenon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erhua), which is also seemingly as random with regard to the words to which it applies.
> For Cantonese and Jyutping specifically, the tone sandhi is marked as, e.g., «faan4*2»
Note that the Jyutping standard actually doesn't specify how tone changes are marked. I believe the * convention originated at https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ to facilitate Cantonese learning. Wiktionary has adopted a similar convention but using a hyphen (-) instead (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:About_Chinese/Cant...).
On the other hand, languages such as Hmong exhibit the complex tone sandhi. Tone sandhi is not as pronounced in Cantonese as it is in some other languages.
> Note that the Jyutping standard actually doesn't specify how tone changes are marked.
No, it does not, and whether an asterisk or a dash is used, it is largely immaterial. What is important, though, is that not every Cantonese dictionary marks off a lexical tone change which might misguide the learner or the seasonal reader.
> For Chinese, modern songs in Mandarin and Cantonese exhibit very different behaviour with respect to the extent to which the melodies affect the lexical tones. In modern Mandarin songs, the melodies dominate, so that the original tones on the lyrics seem to be completely ignored. In Cantonese songs, however, the melodies typically take the lexical tones into consideration and attempt to preserve their pitch contours and relative pitch heights.
[1] https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php...
So, in Hong Kong, when somebody writes a song/lyric that doesn't quite have matching tones, we ask "which church are you from?" to make fun of it.
If you want the Cantonese lyrics to be translations of English lyrics, it severely limit the words you can choose, to the point it is impossible to fully match the melody.
There are therefore an enormous number of homophones in Mandarin, which makes it very challenging to comprehend without context. I've often had native speaking friends eavesdrop on a conversation, only to tell me that they're not sure what is being discussed.
It also means that the language cannot be usefully written phonetically, and thus unique characters are required.
some discussion here:
https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/40574/why-does-m...
https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/39695/does-chine...
https://chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/14596/how-many-s...
Unique characters being required to distinguish homophones in modern written Mandarin is mostly a circular effect due to the characters already being available, so people use them in ways that would be ambiguous when read aloud (as intentional puns or simply to be more concise.)
If there had been no preexisting writing system and written Mandarin was a simple transcription of spoken Mandarin, introducing characters would be about as helpful as indicating the Indo-European roots of words in English writing, which is to say that some people might get a feeling of epiphany after realizing the connection between seemingly disparate words, but it would hardly be practical for everyday use.
> Unique characters being required to distinguish homophones in modern written Mandarin is mostly a circular effect due to the characters already being available, so people use them in ways that would be ambiguous when read aloud (as intentional puns or simply to be more concise.)
Indeed, because of the way Dungan is written, it ended up evolving differently with respect to how new vocabulary is derived, often borrowing words phonetically from Russian instead of constructing them from Chinese morphemes that might otherwise be considered ambiguous when used individually.
While true, I'd bet that some combinations dominate because they sound better/are easier to pronounce.
Also just because you can technically differentiate 160k sound pairs doesn't mean you can do it in a noisy environment.
Japanese and Korean have a similarly limited number of syllables and have very long words compared to English. I'm guessing because they don't have tones.
If you look at communication theory you don't only need distinct sounds, you also need error correction. Which requires extra bits of redundant information.
Tones just make it possible to carry extra bits.
Longer strings of syllables like in Japanese and Korean do the same.
More complex syllables, like in English, too.
It's just multiple different ways of carrying enough bits in speech to work in a noisy environment.
Another analogy could be password strength. You can have a very long numeric password (Japanese & Korean), A password with a mix of a-zA-Z0-9 of medium length (English). A password with weird special characters but shorter (Chinese), and they all end up having the same entropy (given that the password rules are known to the attacker).
There are many common homophones in English that are distinguished by context. Conversation tends to have a lot of context. As a Mandarin speaker, I've never really experienced this context problem. You can make up some artificial examples in English and Chinese but they don't really reflect average communication. Like "The bat and the bow are on the table". It is important to know that a good percentage of words in Mandarin are multi-syllabic (not just one character).
Mandarin can be written phonetically perfectly fine. Currently the most popular systems are Hanyu Pinyin (used in China, Singapore and Malaysia) and Zhuyin (used in Taiwan). Kids learn these systems in school before they learn characters. Chinese characters have a strong historical and cultural value, that's why they are still around.
Vietnamese is written in alphabet without issue. The Dungan people of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan even write their Mandarin-descended language with the Cyrillic script without any tone markings at all - the tones are supplied in a dictionary, but that's it. It works.
Most of the homophones etc. stuff come from people having decided that sinographs are good and then coming up with justifications for keeping them, not really an actual analysis whether Sinitic languages or Japanese would work without. This is a Chinese dictionary: https://imgur.com/a/rdxVh9i
> Mandarin can be written phonetically perfectly fine.
To reinforce this to the readers: https://www.pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html
The author is a native Mandarin speaker who specifically requested that her work not be rendered in sinographs. It should be standard Pinyin orthography except that the author writes 'de' as 'd'.
Yes, people often confuse the "way I do it", "the way it's always been done" or the "official way" as the only way it can be done.
Here's another quote from the source you use:
> "There is no doubt that romanized Classical Chinese would be gibberish"
Invariably these proponents of phonetic writing for Chinese are non-native speakers[1] from the west who seem to have an intense hatred for any aspect of the Chinese language that they consider "Classic Chinese" derived[3]. This of course extends to any sentence that goes beyond "where's the bathroom" and "hello my name is bob" except not even the second example because Chinese names are what these people would consider "classical derived". So you propose a system that would not be able to transcribe __names__. Go to Korean wikipedia and click on a disambiguation page[0]. Or go ask them to show you their ID card[2]. These are a people whose entire national identity is based around not using Chinese writing. A lifetime of both native chinese speakers and non-chinese alike not being able to pronounce my NAME right when rendered in Pinyin is apparently not evidence enough that it's an inadequate system.
> This is a Chinese dictionary: https://imgur.com/a/rdxVh9i
You also leave out that double digit percentages of the Dungan language comes from Arabic and Persian, Russian, Turkic etc. Not even their names are Chinese. What little Chinese is left is a fraction of the amount of Chinese morphemes a normal Chinese speaker knows. Even in your example the entry for "da" has 10 semantically, phonetically, and etymologically different entries. The PRC also tried to enforce phonetic writing on the Yi and Zhuang languages, which had their own scripts that work on the same principles as Chinese. The result was low literacy rates and a population that predominantly still used the old writing system.
I could very well turn your argument against you. Why doesn't English spell pique, peak, peek the same? Pours, pores, poors? Why did a phonetic writing system slowly evolve into what is essentially a logographic script. Why were you able to read the above example relatively easily, but sdrow eht esrever I fi ylkciuq sa ylraen ton? It's almost as if mature readers of all scripts focus primarily on morpheme clusters when reading, and whatever gains you have from supposedly phonetically regular spelling are offset by that, assuming no pronunciation differences of course. By the time you force everyone to either memorize the "proper" pronunciations or simply force them to only use your privileged dialect your orthography will already be out of date. You can reform again, but by then your lexicon will be so etymologically and semantically starved[6] that you'll probably have to construct all your technical terms from some dead language with a stable orthography anyways.
> an actual analysis whether Sinitic languages
It's called general Chinese. The only phonetic system that works for most dialects, and whose spelling requires the same amount of memorization as writing with logographic characters. Of course if your kind had your way, by the time you could force it on every Chinese speaker it would be out of date and not even regular anymore. Of course these discussions usually don't even touch on the concept of morpheme regularity.
Of course all this text is useless because you probably don't speak Chinese well enough to evaluate any primary source, and the motivation for all this is less rational and more a personal vendetta you non-native speakers hold against Chinese being "too hard to learn"[5]. What's funny is it's the same sentiment you expats have for Vietnamese and Korean, Arabic or even Dutch. Even if we lobotomize our language for your sake you'll simply demand we all adopt English anyways.
[0] https://ko.wikipedia.org/wiki/%EC%88%98%EB%8F%84_(%EB%8F%99%...
[1] or some sort of deranged newspeak proponent, usually diaspora
[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en- us/answers/questions/815368/acceptable-types-of-identification-%28az-900-test%29?orderby=newest
[3] Usually the argument against 施氏食獅史, somehow a several sentence long story every native chinese reader would understand being rendered as gibbereished shi shi shi shi shi shi, or maybe shi Shi shi shi shi if you're generous, is a totally reasonable reform in your eyes.
[4] https://www.ddginc-usa.com/can-you-read-this.htm
[5] Not limited to language apparently, no cultural differences can be tolerated by you globalists types. Even chopsticks compel your type to proclaim > "Really? A fork and a spoon is far more superior. It shocks me that chopsticks are still used and that people like using them" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35877051
[6] > Romanticized bullshit views built around Chinese characters.
Leads to Oxymoronic statements where Refusing To "Romanize" is because of "Romanticism". How absurdity like this is supposed to be easy for non-native learners and native children to grasp is beyond me.
>Mandarin can be written phonetically perfectly fine
It can, and I use hanyu pinyin daily, but my point is that given the small space of possible sounds, it often has a great deal of ambiguity, and is mentally taxing to read. Have you ever tried reading an essay or book in pinyin? With syllabic spacing? There will be many places where it is simply not possible to know for certain what a particular word is. And then there are text books, scientific books.
Chinese characters do indeed have strong historical and cultural value, but that is not why they are still around. They are still around because they are essential to the written language.
You can still write the name in Hanyu Pinyin or Zhuyin perfectly fine. It is just that we like character names and that most characters are valid to be used in names so there is a lot more flexibility in what can be a name versus other cultures where there is a less flexible set of names. You can still do something similar in English where you say your name is "rainbow" but you spell it "rhaynbeau", people aren't going to be able to guess that.
> given the small space of possible sounds
Again, see languages like Hawaiian and Vietnamese. They also have small sets of sounds and do fine with romanization.
> Have you ever tried reading an essay or book in pinyin? With syllabic spacing?
Yup, it is just that most people are used to reading Chinese characters and not in romanized Mandarin. There may be other advantages to Chinese characters like quicker recognition and occupying a smaller space, and I am not trying to advocate for eradication of Chinese characters, but I want to stress that is perfectly possible to read and write Mandarin phonetically and characters are not essential.
Also I read and write Taiwanese (Hokkien) in romanized form. Feels like a waste of time to worry about characters, but many people do and end up not writing Taiwanese or using mixed script.
>You can still do something similar in English where you say your name is "rainbow" but you spell it "rhaynbeau",
This is an insulting borderline racist comparison and ties to the same old western trope of treating our names like random sounds. "rhaynbeau" Isn't a word and doesn't carry any meaning.
I am not sure what you mean by holding on for religious reasons? IThere are lot of reasons to write Taiwanese. Anyway, I don't know anything about these forums or have Presbyterian affiliation, but in my real life I use it quite often with friends and family. The reason few people can read it is because few people have learned it. For the majority of Taiwanese speakers it is only a spoken language. Written Taiwanese does not play a large role in public education in Taiwan.
> "rhaynbeau" Isn't a word and doesn't carry any meaning.
It's an imperfect example for non-Chinese speakers to illustrate that it can be hard to guess the character of another person's name but people still understand the sounds when hearing it. A lot of thought goes into choosing the characters for a Chinese name. Other cultures have names that are not related to meaning or are separated very far form the original meaning (the words are for names). Others allow variations on previous names or borrowing from other langauges so likewise those names might be challenging to know the spelling.
This argument used to be made in Korea, yet the country seems to have transitioned to alphabetic writing without issue. A lot of the tax of reading phonetic scripts of Chinese or Japanese is that fluent speakers are simply not at all used to it, even if they can read it.
For example:
ᚦᛁᛋ ᚨᚱᚷᚢᛗᛖᚾᛏ ᚢᛋᛖᛞ ᛏᛟ ᛒᛖ ᛗᚨᛞᛖ ᛁᚾ ᚲᛟᚱᛖᚨ, ᛃᛖᛏ ᚦᛖ ᚲᛟᚢᚾᛏᚱᛃ ᛋᛖᛖᛗᛋ ᛏᛟ ᚺᚨᚹᛖ ᛏᚱᚨᚾᛋᛁᛏᛁᛟᚾᛖᛞ ᛏᛟ ᚨᛚᛈᚺᚨᛒᛖᛏᛁᚲ ᚹᚱᛁᛏᛁᛝ ᚹᛁᚦᛟᚢᛏ ᛁᛋᛋᚢᛖ. ᚨ ᛚᛟᛏ ᛟᚠ ᚦᛖ ᛏᚨᚲᛋ ᛟᚠ ᚱᛖᚨᛞᛁᛝ ᛈᚺᛟᚾᛖᛏᛁᚲ ᛋᚲᚱᛁᛈᛏᛋ ᛟᚠ ᚲᚺᛁᚾᛖᛋᛖ ᛟᚱ ᛃᚨᛈᚨᚾᛖᛋᛖ ᛁᛋ ᚦᚨᛏ ᚠᛚᚢᛖᚾᛏ ᛋᛈᛖᚨᚲᛖᚱᛋ ᚨᚱᛖ ᛋᛁᛗᛈᛚᛃ ᚾᛟᛏ ᚨᛏ ᚨᛚᛚ ᚢᛋᛖᛞ ᛏᛟ ᛁᛏ, ᛖᚹᛖᚾ ᛁᚠ ᚦᛖᛃ ᚲᚨᚾ ᚱᛖᚨᛞ ᛁᛏ.
Same normal English, but Elder Futhark as the script. If you grew up reading that you'd read without issue. Now? It's a pain.
Sure, but English needs them because there are only around 26 letters; compare this to Mandarin, where estimates are in the 400 range.
If anything, letters being overloaded limits the number of syllables we can express.
Edit: About languages losing features, English used to be declined like German or Latin. Only pronouns are declined in modern English, and we don't usually teach it as "pronouns are declined."
Both languages descended from a common ancestor, so you can't necessarily say that one is newer than the other. However, it is the case that Cantonese preserves several features that Mandarin has lost, in particular the complete inventory of final consonants and all of the tone categories of Middle Chinese, which makes it seem better suited for reciting 1000+ year old Tang dynasty poetry where rhyming and tones were especially important.
On the other hand, Cantonese has lost other features that Mandarin has preserved (such as medial vowels and the three-way distinction of initial sibilant consonants), but these features aren't as critical with respect to reciting Tang poetry. For this reason, Cantonese may seem "older" than Mandarin, even though in reality, it's simply that they each have preserved different features and the features that Cantonese preserved happened to make it better for reciting old poetry.
> Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend.
All languages change and will continue to change over time, and while laziness may drive changes in some features of a language, often times other parts of the language become more complex to compensate. This process is called grammaticalization, and is thought to occur in cycles: http://websites.umich.edu/~jlawler/TheGrammaticalizationCycl...
How many songs do you misunderstand the lyrics for on the first few listens, in your native language? For me, in English, I either can't tell exactly what they're saying for some proportion of lyrics, or just totally mishear them _quite_ often (especially depending on the genre).
Music doesn't require every word to be perfectly understandable. Communication does, ideally.
So there's this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM
and more interestingly
Modern English has less complex verbal morphology and noun declension (as you mentioned, only in pronouns). But the set of vowels in Modern English is more complex than that of Old English. Also the vocabulary of Modern English has two main sources: Germanic words (native) and French/Latin/Greek words where a single idea can be expressed in either vocabulary source with different nuances. Old English was mostly comprised of Germanic words with some words borrowed from Latin.
Another interesting thing to note is that languages without tones can gain tones (tonogenesis) and in Old Chinese tones played a much smaller role than the modern descendants. This is often the result of syllables/sound systems becoming less complex and losing contrast so the tone of the word becomes contrastive to maintain a distinction between words.
Contrast that with Cantonese, which I believe still uses a single syllable for most words. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong)
So it makes sense with less tones, because you have more syllables to disambiguate.
Not sure about "most" (depends on the sample distribution I suppose), but single syllable (i.e. character) words are used much more often relative to Mandarin.
So in general you're probably right. Not sure whether that is a cause of more strict adherence to tones in songs though. It could be alternatively argued that the more complex syllable (due to more tones among other things) in Cantonese allowed it to retain single syllable words without having to add extra syllables to clarify any ambiguities.
Yes, pretty much.
It's free and fast. It's very helpful when you want quick feedback.
I learned a lot from it about the pronunciation of consonants as well. The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound.
I just came back from a trip to China and it was noticeable how much more people understood me. Still need to work on vocabulary though...
Well, if you are Dutch, all other consonants from all other languages need a lot more aspiration ;)
GET https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&tl=zh_CN&client=tw-ob&q=<url encoded text>
It's not the most natural sounding TTS engine, but it's free, unauthenticated and trivial to use.
Perhaps, but interpuncts between words are several centuries older than that and occur as natural developments in e.g. the Roman Empire. https://loeb-art-center.vassarspaces.net/wp-content/gallery/...
The concept of word separation is an obvious thing to have. Whether the separator is empty space is unimportant.
In other words, there wasn’t much an incentive or recognized need to make the scribe’s job easy to pick up.
Caesar (I think) tells us that the druids of the Celts did not allow members of their tradition to write down their beliefs, traditions, etc. Writing in that context (prior to 50 BCE) was profane.
Of course, those of us in America are familiar with slaves being prevented from learning to read. Forced illiteracy in this context was a tool of oppression. [1]
I think in one of S.M. Sterling’s fictional books (On the Ocean of Eternity?? Part of the Island in the Sea of Time series, anyway) there’s a great exchange with a Babylonian scribe who laughs at the simplistic alphabet of the American, condescendingly remarking that child could learn that, to which the guy replied, yeah, that’s entirely the point!
1. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/singleton/singleton.html
I can’t help but link this recollection by William Henry Singleton. He recounts being whipped as a child because it was thought that he had merely opened a book, but the whole pamphlet he authored(!) (and available to read in full at that link) after becoming free, fighting in the War, and learning to read/write, is an utterly fascinating account from a primary source spanning from his experience being born into slavery in about 1830 to the point where he authored this in about 1920. It’s too easy to understate but this man saw a lot of change in a momentous century, first-hand.
Since each character represents a syllable, rather than a specific sound, and the written language is essentially not phonetic, reading the characters is an entirely different experience.
OTOH, you have English and German and others that frequently use compound words, and the use of spaces becomes really important to understanding the writing.
I have zero experience with Thai.
Schleifmaschinenverleih would like to have a word with you.
This is parsed as Schleif-Maschinen-Verleih. Verleih means a rental company. The middle one is machine, and the first one I find both sanding and whetting as translations, not sure which one it is. So you can rent sanding and/or whetting machines there.
There are cases where it's ambiguous but for the most part the lack of spaces in compound nouns in German is not an issue.
A somewhat infamous example is Rohrohrzucker which should be parsed as Roh-Rohr-Zucker (raw cane sugar), but Rohr-Ohr-Zucker is also possible (pipe ear sugar). It's pretty clear when it happens that you got the wrong parsing but it takes a while to figure out what the right parsing is :-)
As far as speaking is concerned: I guess the extra spaces in English don't necessarily translate to pauses, do they? Is plugin pronounced differently from plug-in due to the hyphen?
blueberry vs. blue berry
stand up vs. standup
online vs. on line (northeast US term for queueing)
cartwheel vs. cart wheel
Stick compound words in a sentence that doesn't have any spaces at all, and you either have to pause to grok context, or context won't even help you (blue berry vs blueberry). At least German capitalizes all of its nouns, which would certainly help.
Compare this with Chinese, Korean, Japanese or other similar languages that don't use spaces at all (except perhaps after punctuation).
Definitely. The logograms and being in a completely different language family are the real hurdles.
Lexing is very clear in Chinese. It's never the case that you look at a Chinese sentence and don't know where a character ends and another begins. Take this sentence in both languages: "good morning, how are you"
早安，你好吗
This sentence clearly has "spaces" and I'm pretty sure any person illiterate in Chinese could tell you there are 5 characters / words. Technically the third character is composed of 人 and 尔 but I don't know that anyone, even kids or beginners, would mistake those as _not_ going together.
สวัสดีตอนเช้าคุณเป็นอย่างไรบ้าง
In contrast, Thai is as you say: lexing and parsing bleed together. There are 7 words in this sentence, but you need to lex the 10 syllables and run them through your mental dictionary to recognize the possible words they could be. My Thai is very limited, but there are examples of sentences out there that actually have multiple valid readings with different semantic meanings, depending on how you group sounds together.
> Same with Chinese language, thus lexing and parsing requires knowing many more words than in languages with spaces between words.
In English, can you get away with knowing the meaning of "good" and "morning" and not "good morning", and know that I'm greeting you instead of commenting on the quality of this morning?
Where I've had pain specifically with Thai is that I can't even know where a syllable begins and ends until I read a few "syllables" together and decide whether some vowels go with the consonant in front or behind it, and whether some an -ar should be pronounced as an -aan.
As mentioned in another comment, single syllable words are much more common in Cantonese, and word combinations are much more "free" in the sense that there are a lot more ambiguity as to what counts as a "word" and what is merely two single-character-words idiomatically used together. There are also cases where grammatical constructs (and also foul words) are inserted in between a two-character word/idiomatic combo, and sometimes the characters are reversed, to the extent that it used to be a meme: https://evchk.fandom.com/zh/wiki/Y%E5%B7%B2x
It's gotten to a point where, after thinking about it for a couple years, I've come to believe that segmentation on Cantonese is a fool's errand...
Of course, there's also classical Chinese where most of the time a character is a word.
The problem with proper nouns is that they don't end up in dictionaries, same with slang and other terms that for reasons don't end up in dictionaries.
The additional problem with Cantonese is that there's a larger class of words where the constituent characters can move around as if they were words themselves. Even for a native speaker with some experience in lexicography, it can be difficult to determine word boundaries as there are many cases where a word with characters X+Y can be interpreted as just word X and word Y with some idiomatic meaning. This issue is more pronounced in Cantonese because there are more single character words in active use.
I've actually done this before. My experience is that naive segmentation on Mandarin text with wordlist is probably 80+% accurate, while using the same algorithm in Cantonese text (with cantonese wordlist) will definitely end up "wtf".
I'm used to it in Asian languages but it still does my head in when I try to read older Latin documents.
Say, for example:
"Korean people eat kimchi"
In Japanese/Korean, the structure would be:
Korean-person-topic marker-kimchi-object marker-eat-present tense.
In Japanese mixed script, that looks like:
韓国人はキムチを食べます。and would be read as "kankokujinwa kimuchiwo tabemasu".
Splitting it with spaces:
韓国人は キムチを 食べます。
The heftier kanji denoting "Korean person" and at the start of "eat" should be clear even to the untrained eye, while people who've studied the language can easily tell that キムチ is "kimuchi" written in katakana. The sentence is pretty easy to parse without spaces, at the cost of using one of the most insane writing systems in the world.
Now, what if we wrote the entire thing in hiragana instead?
かんこくじんはきむちをたべます。
... yyeaahh. Spaces. Please.
かんこくじんは きむちを たべます。There, much better, though almost no one fluent in Japanese has practice reading stuff like that.
In Korean, without spaces we'd have:
한국사람들은김치를먹어요. Again, similar problems. Korea has adopted spaces now that they don't use sinographs, so we'd have:
한국 사람들은 김치를 먹어요. (han'guk sa'ram'deul'eun kim'chi'reul mog'o'yo)
If we wrote "Korean person" with the same Sinitic loans in the Japanese sentence, we might get:
한국인들은 김치를 먹어요. (han'gug'in'deul'eun kim'chi'reul mog'o'yo)
Spaces clearly do help.
It is interesting to me when written Chinese and Japanese use commas. It is pretty much never required, but pure style. It does help to breakup a complex sentence, similar to phonetic languages.
(I don't know Japanese so I can't speak to that)
起初我見到一碟芽菜同西芹，以為佢上錯菜，用刀叉掘咗幾下，終於見到埋咗響底嘅叉燒。
Nobody writes it like this:
起初我見到一碟芽菜同西芹以為佢上錯菜用刀叉掘咗幾下終於見到埋咗響底嘅叉燒。
Can people parse the latter (with some difficulty)? Sure. The commas are not required to the extent that you can butcher the sentence even more without losing its essential meaning, but why stop there? You can remove even more stuff from it and still retain most of the meaning:
初我見碟芽菜同西芹以為上錯用刀叉掘幾下終見埋底嘅叉燒
But that's not how people write.
Japanese has a lot of “hint” on word (nouns) ending.
This is unlike [C]hinese.
The thing that bugs me about written Thai is that there are spaces now and then and you would expect them to be at sentence breaks but they seem to be randomly placed throughout the text, almost as if that's where the writer felt like he needed to take a breath instead of where one sentence ends and another begins.
中国共产党, is that one word? should you break it up as 中国 共产党? what about 中国 共产 党? i dont think its nearly as clear which of these is correct as it is in english
https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/xx5g39/cantone_an_...
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cantone/id1602297692
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cantone.ca...
That said, I still think your post raises some excellent points. To refine it, how about an online learning app that plays a sound or video clip from a national news TV or radio program. (Usually, the speakers have perfect pronunciation.) You repeat the words; the online app records it; then, it shows your tones/pitch/accent versus the native speaker. I think that could be incredibly useful. My point: Speech reco is an impossibly hard problem (currently) due to infinitely broad context in spoken languages. My idea would have "perfect context", so speech reco could really work.
When I was learning tones for a while, I used to record myself, then replay it. It's amazing to hear the difference between what you think you sound like and what you really sound like. An online app could help to fine tune your pronunciation very quickly.
Is this still the case?
How does 2001 software compares to 2023 software? Or 2010 to 2023 for that matter
I haven't tried differentiating tones for discrete words with the recent batch of generic models but I think it might still struggle. I suspect a fine-tuned task-specific classifier might be needed for decent results.
There are also plenty of tonal languages outside East/Southeast Asia, in South Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and that's just ones I know of.
Languages also switch, like ancient Greek.
There's some linguistic pattern where consonant clusters at the end of words get dropped, but their 'effect' on the vowel remains and that's how these kind of tones develop.
IIRC there's also two different kind of tones, pitch tones, and register tones....
Languages are crazy.
> In finals that end in a stop consonant, the number of tones is reduced to three; in Chinese descriptions, these "checked tones" are treated separately by diachronic convention, so that Cantonese is traditionally said to have nine tones. However, phonetically these are a conflation of tone and final consonant; the number of phonemic tones is six in Hong Kong and seven in Guangzhou.
In Guangzhou Cantonese, 衫 (shirt) and 三 (three) are not homophones, but they are in Hong Kong Cantonese. The Jyutping romanization (from the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong) reflects this change in HK Cantonese (saam1), whereas Yale, based on the older pronunciation, could represent the difference in tone (sāam vs sàam).
Interestingly enough, the high-falling tone is still retained in Hong Kong Cantonese for one exceedingly common word, the final particle 㖭 (tim1/tìm)!
It would be interesting to give a Hong-Konger a test with pairs of characters, one of 1st tone and the other 7th tone, and see whether they can guess which is which.
I suspect with minimal training they'd be able to score significantly better than random chance. (Willing to try it out!)
Using tones is so natural that many native Cantonese speakers are unaware that the language even has tones lol.
When you read about tonal languages online, there is so much emphasis on "tonal languages are special". I don't understand why accent and pitch isn't added to the same bucket. In Japanese, accent and pitch is rarely taught, but incredibly important in daily life. Japanese is stuffed full of homophones which makes listening a tricky matter. BTW -- I am sure there are other "non-tonal" languages that I don't know about where pitch and accent are important (Korean?).
If you consistently pronounce words with the wrong accent or pitch, (average, uptight) Japanese listeners will refuse to understand it. Say what you like about it (fake/real/whatever), it is a common response.
I have an old Quora answer here that goes into more detail: https://qr.ae/pyNupi
- High level
- Mid level
- Low (includes "low falling" and "low level")
- Rising (includes "low rising" and "mid rising")
I've combined similar tones into the Low and Rising categories. If you are a non-native Cantonese speaker, and don't differentiate between "low falling" and "low level", native Cantonese speakers will still understand you.
It's difficult for a non-native speaker to distinguish between "low rising" and "mid rising".... so just treat it as a rising tone. I'm a native speaker and sometimes I forget which type of rising tone a particular word is.... I didn't learn it that way, haha. I just learned to say the word the same way my parents did.
The 7th, 8th, and 9th tones are short versions of the three level tones, and they all end in a consonant (like "k"). If you pronounced them the same, but make the syllable very short, you'll be fine.
So yeah.... think of it as 4 tones, just like Mandarin. Three different level tones at high, middle, low pitches, and one rising tone :-).
Whilst it is true that in the case of Cantonese some tones can be misused without the loss of the comprehension in a conversion, and the non-native speaker will still be understood if the surrounding context is clear and concise, that is not the case with the low falling tone, which is the most unforgiving of all. Cantonese speakers are prone to get thoroughly confused when the low falling tone is substituted for a flat low tone or a low rising one. Consider 墳墓 and 分母 when the context is insufficient to deduce which word was actually meant; it is perhaps not the best example but I can't think of a better one at the moment.
EDIT: 大麻, 大馬 and 大媽 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35870392 are better examples.
> It's difficult for a non-native speaker to distinguish between "low rising" and "mid rising".... so just treat it as a rising tone. I'm a native speaker and sometimes I forget which type of rising tone a particular word is.... I didn't learn it that way, haha.
Most native speakers of tonal languages are not even aware of the fact their native language has tones. They don't think about it, they don't think about the tones. Tones are a concept for speakers of languages that do not have the tones in the first place.
So: some words end in a stop, which is sometimes counted as a different tone even though the pitch pattern isn't different. For example, consider fan versus fat.
TLDR: No. There are 6 tones in Cantonese, the 9 "categories" are made referring to Middle Chinese.
---
Middle Chinese had 4 tones[1]. The 4th tone, "entering" (or "checked"), is words that end in stops (p/t/k). Because of the way it evolved, none of those words in Cantonese have tones 2, 4, or 5 (but not exactly, see below). In other words, they all have tones 1, 3, or 6.
To emphasize this observation and to make a connection to the 4 tones in middle Chinese, some analysis call them tones 7, 8, 9, with names upper dark/lower dark/light entering[2].
But such an analysis has nothing to do with how a modern Cantonese speaking brain process the sounds. E.g. Cantonese has a tone-change to tone 2 for the diminutive form, when this happens to a word that ends with p/t/k[3], the 9 tone framework cannot describe that.
---
Caveat: when I said "Cantonese" above I mean the dominant dialect of Cantonese spoken in Guangzhou/Hong Kong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_tones_(Middle_Chinese)
Tone systems are different in the sense that each syllable has it's own countour. (Of course, when realized, these get merged according to various phonological processes) Japanese differs from tone systems in that it has only one culminative pitch contour over multi-syllable words.
(Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent.)
Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent.
1) "Culminativity" is actually considered the most helpful functionality of the pitch accent. It helps making sense of word boundaries, as there can be only one prominent syllable per word. In spoken word of any language, there are no "spaces" (there are no spaces in written Japanese either, though), so languages need to provide accommodations for aural parsing strategies.
2) The other functionality provided by the pitch accent is distinctiveness, which means that there are some homonyms (similar-sounding words), that are only differentiated by the pitch accent. However, that is only a secondary functionality. In Mandarin Chinese, tones play a lot more important role for making sense of the meaning of the word. In Japanese, they play a role, but not a significant one. (There are some hundreds of minimal pair words that differ only by the pitch accent pattern, but as many regional dialects also have slightly different accent patterns, clearly 100% nailing the pattern isn't required for communication, as long as the general principles (such as one drop per word) are followed.)
3) Japanese is said to be an "isochronic" language, which means it has (or at least, is perceived to have) a simple integer-based rythm. For example, Haiku, a famous genre of Japanese poetry is based on these rythms, unit of which is called haku (拍) in Japanese or mora in Latin/English. In context of poetry metrics, mora is often misrepresented as a "syllable", but actually, there are uni- and bimoraic (and rarely, trimoraic) syllables in Japanese. An example: 2-mora "ma-to" means a target (in archery etc). 3-mora "ma-t-to" means a "mat/carpet". 3-mora "ma-n-to" means a cloak. 3-mora "ma-to-o" meas "let's wait". 3-mora "ma-to-n" means "mutton meat". 4-mora "ma-t-to-o" means "proper/straight". But every one of these are two-syllable words!
4) The rythm of Japanese speech is not concerned with the pitch accent prominence, unlike stress in English, which tends to make stressed syllables longer and louder (and more defined in vowel quality). Indeed, it is often said that "syllables" are an irrelevant concept for Japanese. However, phonologically that isn't true at all. The rythm of Japanese is indeed dependent mostly on moras, but the pitch accent patterns, where the prominent drop of pitch tends to happen, is highly dependent on syllable structure. It never happens on "weak" morae, which are called the "coda" or tail of the syllable. It always happens on the start of a syllable.
(Source: 10 years learning Japanese, followed by marrying someone from Taiwan.)
there is a wealth of resources for learning mandarin but only a smattering for cantonese.
two favorites:
1. web dictionary http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/scripts/wordsearch.php?leve...
2. iOS dictionary that is free and comprehensive, also covers mandarin: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pleco-chinese-dictionary/id341...
unaffiliated with either company, just a longtime user.
other suggestions for cantonese resources welcome.
I've found it surprisingly hard to find a summary of the differences.
By contrast learning German from Danish seemed to have some bits that made it clear reasonably fast.
And can't you just start watching TV shows and movies in Mandarin? It should be a lot easier than for us mortals who start out without knowing any Sinitic languages. We have to work hard just to handle the tones and the near total lack of shared vocabulary.
I am puzzled that learning Mandarin for you hasn't gone much the same way as learning German did.
There is of course the standard way of playing with HelloChinese (or similar apps) and LingQ/Du Chinese (or similar apps) + reading easy readers (Mandarin Companion, Chinese Breeze, and similar). You should be able to speedrun them, compared to the long slog path that we mortals have to take.
(A fellow Dane with zero East Asian parentage.)
Cantonese and Mandarin weirdly seem to have wandered further from each other than Danish and German. At least for me, but that may also be lack of exposure.
unfortunately, i failed to cherish this opportunity and spoke english predominantly as a child, leaving me with heavily-accented and vocabulary-limited cantonese.
i have spent an inordinate amount of time repairing these deficiencies and learning mandarin as well.
a little more self-awareness and foresight as a teenager could have saved me years of learning as an adult.
on the upside, self-learning has yielded insights into chinese language and culture, learning, and accents. unsure if these other perspectives are worth the extra time and effort, though. :)
* jyutpin typing game https://chaaklau.github.io/cantorocks/
Noted.
As an example, I speak Mandarin and can't read/write (much) Chinese characters as I spoke it at home while growing up in Australia. So, I can imagine there'd be quite a lot who are in a similar situation to me but with Cantonese who would benefit from this (not just as a learning tool).
I've been using the Zhongwen[0] browser extension to "read" websites that have Chinese characters for many years as hovering over Chinese characters will display a popup with the pronunciation ping yin. It may not be the speediest way of understanding a block of Chinese text.
I could imagine someone creating a browser extension that would replace the font used on the website(s) with the Cantonese Visual Font when the extension is enabled.
e.g., Hann-Tzong Wang's (王漢宗) free font collection[1] includes two typefaces with phonetic pronunciation guidance. These are wp{0..3}10-05.ttf and wp{0..3}10-08.ttf [2] As you can see from the filenames, there are actually four different font files for each of these two typefaces. The font files numbered {1..3} are for 「破音字」, characters with alternate pronunciation.
When a user types a word like 「給予」 (ㄐ一ˇㄩˇ/jǐ yǔ) for which there is an alternate, less-common pronunciation (ㄐ一ˇ/jǐ instead of ㄍㄟˇ/gěi for 給) they simply change the font for just the affected character to the variant with the correct pronunciation.
In the case of this Cantonese Font, the authors distribute a single .ttf (alongside a “phrasebook” .ttf whose purpose is not clear to me) and indicate in the Roadmap section of the website that ligature support must be enabled. If alternate pronunciations are common in Cantonese, then I suspect that they must use some ligature-based method. I would have to imagine there must be cases where this could be ambiguous, but I don't know how you would resolve those.
(In practice, just swapping the font on a single character works fairly well.)
[1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/wangfonts/
[2] https://dywang.csie.cyut.edu.tw/dywang/download/pdf/sample-o...
This is the phonetic system that is used most commonly in Taiwan.
Typically, phonetic pronunciation guidance is used only in educational materials. For native speakers, this means materials only for very small children. However, in Taiwan, it's not uncommon to see 注音符號 guidance to indicate when a word should be said with a non-Mandarin pronunciation. You'll see this, for example, in shops whose names contain a pun when using the Taiwanese Hokkien pronunciation.
There are other fonts that include pronunciation guidance in hànyǔ pīnyīn 漢語拼音, the phonetic system used most commonly in China: e.g., http://fonts.mobanwang.com/200909/5832.html
I don't think there are any fonts with pronunciation guidance in any of the other phonetic systems (e.g., 通用拼音, Wade-Giles, 國語羅馬字) but these have almost all fallen into disuse and appear only in old signage, historical place names, or in people's names.
(Presumably, if you are born in Taiwan, you get to pick how you want your named romanized… especially since you may want the spelling of your name to match that of your relatives. But are you allowed to pick any transliteration you desire?)
The page says they do handle variations:
Pronunciation in the Cantonese Font adapts to the context. Based on what comes before or after, the Jyutping romanization changes to the right one. The magic behind this is a careful curation from 100,000 contexts where the pronunciation differs from the standalone character.----
Conceptually it is simple: 1. assign a default (most likely) sound for each character, 2. loop through contexts, extracting words (char-combos) where the sound is different from the default ("alt-word") 3. create SVGs + font-paths (fallback for incompatible systems) for every char and every alt-word 4. assign a ligature to substitute each char-sequence that forms the alt-word (e.g., "when 乾 隆 appears adjacently, replace with `uniF1234` (the codepoint for the alt-word 乾隆")
It is not perfect, but I didn't expect this to work so well, and was stunned when the testers report high accuracy. I have always believed that bespoke computation with word segmentation (with some 1M frequency attached library) and large data-bank (100k+ words) was necessary.
----
Practically it was horrific, tedious, mind-numbing, gawd-awful set of "why this doesn't work": 1. SVG automation that works for 10^3 breaks with 10^5 2. what worked for Latin breaks for unicode 3. what worked for unicode breaks for PUA 4. what worked for monochrome breaks for color 5. what worked for single glyphs breaks for ligatures 6. what?! The assignments in the database is wrong?? 7. [...]
As I was trying to coerce the system to do what it wasn't designed to do, many of these breaks are undocumented, pretty mysterious to solve, and some steps just got manually gritted through. (And each of the 15k+ glyphs got gritted through about five times.)
It does look pretty elegant at the end ;)
> Unfortunately, without being able to do proper word segmentation, this will remain a limitation.
Can the user manually add a zero width space to help?
(For everyone else wonder what ackfoobar is proposing: let's take the phrase (if you don't read Chinese, just treat them as shapes) 香港地少人多, properly segmented, is 香港.地少.人多. The font treats this incorrectly, because "香港地" is a commonly used fragment, the 地 in the fragment have a special sound, and parsing as 香港地.少.人多 gives a mistaken sound for 地.
Ackfoobar is absolutely correct that we can coerce the correct reading by going 香港[ ]地少人多 --- where the [ ] is an invisible spacer. My contention is that most users don't know how to do that in their favorite word processor.
Someone is probably thinking, could you add "香港地少" as a fragment? Purist says it's not pretty, but I'm a pragmatist, so I did do many of these patching. Doing this or not relies on some acumen as a native speaker, and there were hundreds of these decisions made. This language knowledge would be necessary if someone were to do Mandarin (or Thai or, ...))
I notice you're using OpenType-SVG here; have you investigated whether it would be possible to implement this using COLRv1 (which would potentially result in a lighter-weight font, I suspect, and eventually wider support)? Or are there technical limitations in COLRv1 that make it impossible?
But I did try to make it into COLRv1 (as well as COLR/CPAL). The only tools that build COLRv1 right now are the tools from the Google Fonts team; I remember them stalling for hours before saying completion, yet the output was broken (I can't remember how it was broken).
I personally would love to see a COLR/CPAL version, and have some idea on how that could happen. But I probably should be working on some revenue-generating product instead ;)
The history of digital fonts added a great deal of complexity to font formats, and without him writing such a concise yet comprehensive guide, I would have been stuck for even longer.
Setting aside for a minute the question of whether you _should_, I wonder how far you can take this? I.e. what limits are there on how much context you can take into account, etc.?
This is all off the beaten path, so I suspect the answer is no one knows. Font tables have a limit of 65k characters, but this ceiling can be busted in whacky ways using multiple lookups, useExtension... Practically, font building tools / operations crash (mysteriously), stalls (mysteriously), or slows to a crawl (indistinguishable from stalling), and the Cantonese Font about pushes the limit.
Another large class class comes from vestiges of derivational morphology in Old Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph#In_Chinese For instance, the character 度 in modern Mandarin can be pronounced dù (when used as a noun) or duó (when used as a verb), both of which derived from Old Chinese /daːɡs/ and /daːɡ/, respectively.
With Simplified Chinese characters, some of them come from the merger of originally different words that had similar, but not exactly the same pronunciations. For instance, both 髮 (fà) and 發 (fā) were merged into 发.
The 3/6 tones in Cantonese and ˋ (4th, falling tone) in Mandarin are the "departing" tone, which comes from the departing tone in Middle Chinese, which I believe comes from the -s ending in Old Chinese.
* 行: xíng or háng
* 的: de or dì
* 长: cháng or zhǎng
(plus I'm sure many more that I can't think of just right now)
Example
觉得 juede, to think 睡觉 shuijiao, to sleep
Here the same character is pronounced jue or jiao depending on context
- 说服/說服 Mandarin: shuì fú Cantonese: seoi3 fuk6
- 说话/說話 Mandarin: shuō huà Cantonese: syut3 waa6
The idea is that each honzi has exactly one meaning is a misconception.
With respect to ligatures, if by that you mean the length of the same word across different Sinitic languages, that depends on the specific language and its phonology. Mandarin, for instance, has lost a large number of finals over the course of its evolution which has resulted in words generally being longer and requiring extra syllables to resolve the phonetic ambiguity. The Sinitic languages that have retained more finals (and sounds in general) tend to have more of shorter words. Cantonese is one of them albeit not the only one.
That's new to me; previously I had only seen Pinyin and Wade-Giles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade%E2%80%93Giles
Wikipedia has a nice article on the history and a number of other systems:
1. Multiple Romanisation formats (Jyutping vs Yale) 2. Many community lead dictionaries with varying completeness. 3. Many web resources for learning words/phrases/etc use a mixture of traditional characters, jyutping, yale, or something else.
Its very difficult to find the content in the format a learner needs. Hopefully something like this will help learners use content written using traditional characters.
I whole-heartedly agree. I am a native speaker, and "fluent" in jyutping, yet I have such a hard time with Yale.
One service I'm going to build is a mapping tool between {R1, R2, ...Rn} and {G1, G2, ...Gn} where R is romanization method and G are y/z-variants of glyphs. (These, for the most part, already exists inside packages I built for building the font, and just need to have an UI to expose it to the world.) It would sure save me lots of time trying to read Matthews-Yip...
My thought is that if there's a common data format for a Cantonese sentence with jyutping/yale/traditional + translation(s), the user could then pick what to display.
It could then also be worked into games/learning exercises. Placeholders could be made with a number of options so users could learn how to slot different adjectives into sentences, for example.
(I have the same username on Reddit, by the way. Sorry I never got to test it out for you!)
Does anyone know of such a font for Manadrin?
It was previously featured on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22213406
[1] https://visual-fonts.com/#jp-carousel-1092 [2] https://wy-lang.org/
Nationalism at its worst.
Microsoft Bing Translator does support Cantonese tho.
As an example, this is the sentence "Please give me his book" written in Standard Written Chinese using "Chinese Traditional" characters: 請你給我他的書。
If you use "Chinese Simplified" characters[2] instead, it would still be the same words, but some of the characters have simpler forms: 请你给我他的书。
However, both of those renderings still follow Mandarin vocabulary and grammar. Even though Cantonese speakers generally read and write Standard Written Chinese (in either Traditional or Simplified characters), if they were to actually convey that sentence in spoken Cantonese, it would actually be quite different. Written Cantonese[3] is generally only used in informal contexts, but a rendering of the sentence in Cantonese would instead be: 唔該你畀佢本書我。 (Traditional) 唔该你畀佢本书我。 (Simplified)
The written Cantonese version uses vocabulary and grammatical constructions that are not part of Standard Written Chinese, and Google Translate is currently not able to translate to written Cantonese. I've found that over time though, Google Translate has been getting better at translating from written Cantonese to English (however, for the example I just gave, it appears it still completely botches the translation; it currently thinks it translates to "You shouldn't have let her book me").
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_characters [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese
"Please give me his book" is translated to: 請把他的書畀我。 While it does use the usual Cantonese word for "give" (畀), the rest of the sentence still mostly uses Mandarin vocabulary and grammar, notably the 把 construction, the third-person pronoun 他, and the use of the 的 genitive particle, which aren't typically used in spoken Cantonese.
Conversely, 唔該你畀佢本書我 is translated to: "Please give him this book me." This seems to indicate that it doesn't understand Cantonese's ability to use measure words (such as 本) as genitive particles, nor does it understand that the word order of the direct and indirect objects in the sentence are switched compared to the usual order in Standard Written Chinese.
> Translate "please give me his book" to Cantonese.
> > "請俾我佢嘅書" is the Cantonese translation for "please give me his book".
This appears generally fine though stylistically not as colloquial. Using 請 for "please" is considered more formal since it's usually more written than spoken. In addition, it uses the Cantonese genitive particle 嘅, though I think most speakers would prefer to use the measure word 本 in this context, but this is still perfectly grammatical. Lastly, it still retains the same word order for direct and indirect objects as Standard Written Chinese, which while not completely colloquial, is still considered acceptable when spoken.
BTW, since written Cantonese isn't standardized, 畀 can often be seen written as 俾, but they refer to the same word.
> Translate "唔該你畀佢本書我" to English.
> > The Cantonese phrase "唔該你畀佢本書我" translates to "Please give me his book" in English.
Exactly correct.
Real life Cantonese: 拎佢本書黎thx
```// This script changes the font of all Mandarin character on a page.
const url = chrome.runtime.getURL('font/Hanzi-Pinyin-Font.top.ttf');
const fontFace = ` @font-face { font-family: ZhongwenFont; src: url(${url}) } `;
window.onload = function () { const styleSheet = document.createElement("style"); styleSheet.innerHTML = fontFace document.head.appendChild(styleSheet); // For static pages, handle all elements: document.body.querySelectorAll("").forEach(handleElement); // support for dynamic pages // For dynamic apps, like Twitter, observe all DOM mutations henceforth within document body: addMutationObserver();
}
function handleText(textNode) { // Regular expression to match all Chinese characters const regex = /[\p{Script=Han}]+/gu; if (regex.test(textNode.nodeValue)) { const { style } = textNode.parentElement; style.fontFamily = 'ZhongwenFont'; style.fontSize = "large" } }
function addMutationObserver() { const observer = new MutationObserver(function (mutations) { mutations.forEach(function (mutation) { mutation.target.querySelectorAll("").forEach(handleElement); }); }); observer.observe(document.body, { subtree: true, childList: true }); }
function handleElement(e) { e.childNodes.forEach((child) => { if (child && !isUserInput(child) && child.nodeName === "#text") { handleText(child); } }); }
// Some helper functions used by the code above: function isUserInput(node) { const tagName = node.tagName ? node.tagName.toLowerCase() : ""; return ( tagName == "input" || tagName == "textarea" || isInsideContentEditable(node) ); }
function isInsideContentEditable(node) { while (node.parentNode) { if (node.contentEditable === "true") { return true; } node = node.parentNode; } return false; }```
I've used https://chaaklau.github.io/cantorocks/, but I would like to also try others, as the audio is not great sometimes and I'd like to listen to different voices.
When studying Mandarin I found that getting the phonetics right early on really helped me, it can be done in a relatively short time and its hugely motivating.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Chinese/comments/xx5g39/cantone_an_...
[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cantone/id1602297692
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cantone.ca...
* https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/shuowenRadica...
and there are graphs that can't be input by emacs chinese-ctlaub. Associating a cognitive complexity load score for each graph to guide learning would help.
Especially given modern font ligatures letting you change the meanings displayed based on context (the way things like Fira code do).
Maybe don't even show the Chinese characters, just their meaning in English? It's obviously not going to be perfect, but I think there's potential there for a fun project.
You could potentially design ligatures for every word in the dictionary, but given the vastly different grammar, you wouldn’t be able to understand what a sentence said. You might be able to glean ‘this sentence involves a dog.’ Even google translate makes such poor translations, that it can really only assist in understanding. It usually doesn’t understand the subject of the sentence and confuses all the pronounced into ‘I.’
e.g. The classic example is 大麻煩 - is it 大|麻煩 (a big inconvenience), or is it 大麻|煩 (marijuana annoyance)? Is 粉絲 fan, or vermicelli? Is 早唞！ “good night!” or “go fuck yourself!”?
Bonus: 大媽 daai6 maa1/dà mā (auntie or father’s elder brother’s wife, literally ‘big mother’).
> The Cantonese Font is a piece of culture funded from our savings, and from revenue from our dance studio in Causeway Bay. If you are in Hong Kong, come join our fun, friendly, best Argentine Tango classes for all levels at www.eli.dance
There are six or nine tones in Cantonese:
high middle rising middle low rising low low falling
There are also three "entering" tones that some people don't distinguish at all, as they're sort of just the high/middle/low tones but short. I couldn't tell you whether they're really separate tones or just short versions of the first six.
You can see how the tone marks on the font line up with the tones here -- if you know them, the font marks are a reasonable guide.
I would be perfectly happy if a non-native speaker pronounces "c" and "z" like the English "ch" and soft "g".
Is there some easy way one change the font used by Spotify to be this font somehow?
Good stopgap though. Do they have plans to do the same for other languages?
If you’d prefer physical books, this online store imports quite a few from Hong Kong.[2]
A dictionary program for Windows/Mac/Linux that I make [3], and another for mobile that I don’t make.[4]
Finally, a list of other good resources from Cantonese Alliance.[5]
It's an offshoot of https://words.hk (which has a Chinese interface). AFAIK we're the only modern Cantonese-Cantonese and Cantonese-English dictionary that is both comprehensive (50k+ entries) and word (詞) focused (i.e. not only explaining meaning of characters).
It's a huge undertaking, we've been on this for almost 10 years, and probably almost half-way done.
FWIW words.hk has quite a bit of traffic (from native/near-native speakers presumably) due to being well indexed by Google, but cantowords.com is relatively new and could benefit from more attention :)
PS: some of our content has made way to Cantonese dictionary apps as mentioned in sibling post(s), but the web site contains the most up to date content (which does get updated on a day to day basis as editing work proceeds)
At the time, I heavily relied on another great Cantonese dictionary/resource site: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/
In addition to the Jyutping Cantonese pronunciation, it also shows corresponding Hanyu pinyin pronunciation for Mandarin. There are also number of learning resources on the site. I love how you can mouseover any character to get a pop up to learn more about the character - it's meaning as a single character, pronunciation, etc.
Japanese Children learn Kanji with Furigana, so there are solutions for them.
Some examples I found:
- https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-furigana-phon...
However the third link, with the Mac Pages, really great.
Think of it as trying to compress several kilobytes of information down to several bytes of information and then trying to reconstruct the original data all in the CPU when you have dedicated hardware several orders of magnitude more powerful and which uses a non-compatible black box compression scheme.