I see it, I understand what's going on - it's clear, but I still cannot read it. How do you read those pronunciations?
Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
#12I see it, I understand what's going on - it's clear, but I still cannot read it. How do you read those pronunciations?
The font annotates each character using the Jyutping system for Cantonese pronunciation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping
Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
#13I see it, I understand what's going on - it's clear, but I still cannot read it. How do you read those pronunciations?
You have to understand both how the jyutping romanization works (i.e. what sound 'bat' makes) as well as what the tones in Cantonese are. I'll let you read about the initials and finals (mostly consonants and vowels). There are some tricky ones: the 'c' in cat is pronounced more like an aspirated 'ts'.
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.
Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know, Mandarin doesn't have multiple pronunciations for the same character-- does Cantonese? Aside of that, you could use ligatures for that, couldn't you?
Mandarin absolutely does: * 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)
Did it get more numerous with the adoption of simplified characters?
Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
#15Something's not clear here to me, how does this handle words with multiple pronounciations using a font alone?
As far as I know, Mandarin doesn't have multiple pronunciations for the same character-- does Cantonese? Aside of that, you could use ligatures for that, couldn't you?
Mandarin definitely has many characters with multiple pronunciations. One large class come from literary vs. colloquial reading differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readin...
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.
Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
#16As 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 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:
Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
#17Something's not clear here to me, how does this handle words with multiple pronounciations using a font alone?
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.?
Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
#18As 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…
Isn't true that Cantonese has 9 tones?
Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
#19As 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.
Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation
#20A friend of mine noticed the website thumbnail image is FizzBuzz but in classical Chinese.