31–40 of 206 posts
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.
As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages and the meaning of words are depending on how you speak the syllables inside the words. Mandarin has four, Thai has five, Cantonese has six and Vitnamese has six tones. Overall about 20% or 1.5 billion of the world's population converse daily in tonal languages. It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection…
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.*
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps they use the same technology as ligatures? There could be a glyph for the standalone character, but also special glyphs for certain combos? 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 pronunc…
I've seen ligatures (or whatever the underlying feature is in font formats) used for some wild stuff, but this takes the cake. They're effectively encoding a small amount of natural language processing in a font. 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.?
Something's not clear here to me, how does this handle words with multiple pronounciations using a font alone?
I am not a Cantonese speaker; however, in Mandarin, fonts with phonetic guidance are very common. 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 「…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spaces between words is a relatively recent Irish invention (7th or 8th century) in western written language, so it’s not like it’s an obvious thing to have.
12 centuries should be plenty of time for a simple upgrade to improve the UX of a language.
As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages and the meaning of words are depending on how you speak the syllables inside the words. Mandarin has four, Thai has five, Cantonese has six and Vitnamese has six tones. Overall about 20% or 1.5 billion of the world's population converse daily in tonal languages. It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection…
The annnoying part in written thai is thattherearenospacesbetweenwords.
I'm used to it in Asian languages but it still does my head in when I try to read older Latin documents.
this is awesome. thanks for sharing. 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. othe…
As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages and the meaning of words are depending on how you speak the syllables inside the words. Mandarin has four, Thai has five, Cantonese has six and Vitnamese has six tones. Overall about 20% or 1.5 billion of the world's population converse daily in tonal languages. It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection…
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...
As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages and the meaning of words are depending on how you speak the syllables inside the words. Mandarin has four, Thai has five, Cantonese has six and Vitnamese has six tones. Overall about 20% or 1.5 billion of the world's population converse daily in tonal languages. It will be very helpful if someone come up with automatic tonal detection…
> 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 […] 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),…
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...).