Help:Cantonese
Please note: this page is very much under construction, and so are the Cantonese readings shown in Zi entries that link to this page. This material has not yet been reconciled with our new ABC Cantonese-English Dictionary by Robert S. Bauer. An important difference is that the readings in Zi entries use a modified Yale romanization, as described below, whereas the new dictionary uses Jyutping, with numbers for the tones.
Cantonese, also known as 粤语 Yuèyǔ (Yuht-yuh/) or 广东话 Guǎngdōnghuà (Gwong/dung\wah-), is one of the most widely spoken Chinese languages, especially in southeast China including 广东 Guǎngdōng (Canton) Province and Hong Kong, and also in other countries including the United States.
Wenlin includes transcriptions for the Cantonese pronunciations of over 11,000 single characters. A modified Yale romanization is used.
Each syllable is followed by one of three tone symbols (backslash, slash, and hyphen): \ falling; / rising; and - level. Low tones are indicated by the letter h following a vowel. Altogether six tones are possible: (1) high falling (fan\); (2) high rising (fan/); (3) middle level (fan-); (4) low falling (fahn\); (5) low rising (fahn/); and (6) low level (fahn-). A high level tone also occurs in some circumstances as a variant of the high falling tone; in the transcription, it is not distinguished from the high falling tone. (Note that outside of Wenlin, tone marks are commonly placed over vowels, and the level tone is often unmarked; we have placed the tone marks after each syllable in order to distinguish Cantonese from Mandarin pinyin. This may change if a better method is employed in future versions.)
Consonants represent APPROXIMATELY the same sounds as in Mandarin pinyin (or in English), but there aren't as many. There is no distinction between j and zh, or between q and ch, in Cantonese; only j and ch are written. X, q, and z don't occur at all. Ng- can be an initial. P, t, k, and m can be finals, in addition to n and ng (which are the only final consonants in Mandarin). Vowels are another matter...
Our primary sources for Cantonese transcriptions are the Unihan Database (Unicode Consortium, http://www.unicode.org) and Read And Write Chinese by Rita Mei-Wah Choy (China West Books, 1990).
Unfortunately, the current version of Wenlin does not include sound recordings of Cantonese.
