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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#101

Post by ddeck »

dumbotron wrote: post #77
teleforce wrote: post #16

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…

I got curious about something with tonal languages: how are song melodies written for them. For some, the melody matched the tones of the word. Then there's Mandarin. Mandarin just follows the melody, and you can figure out the word by context. As an English speaker, this makes ~cents~ sense. Homophones aren't a big deal. If Mandarin doesn't need tones in lyrics, why does it need them normally?

It needs them because there are too few unique syllables in Mandarin. I'm sure a linguist can provide the proper terminology, but there are only around 400 unique sounds in Mandarin, ignoring tones. Even adding five tones still only increases this to ~1500 (not all are used). Compare this to English, where estimates are in the 10-15k range.

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...

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#102

Post by inkyoto »

ghayes wrote: post #4
kelvie wrote: post #3

Something'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?

Both do. A single, isolated Chinese character may have multiple unrelated meanings with some of them having an entirely unrelated pronunciation. It is, in fact, ubiquitous.

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.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#103

Post by hnfong »

hashmush wrote: post #92
dumbotron wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realizing no one's going to change a language with 900 million speakers, do you think it's because there's a lot of ambiguity, or is it because it's a cognitive load people aren't used to? Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese, and it has fewer tones. Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend. Edit: About languages losing features, English used t…

From my understanding Mandarin has a lot of two-syllable words and in many of the words the second syllable doesn't add much, if any, additional meaning. 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.

> which I believe still uses a single syllable for most words

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.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#104

Post by dumbotron »

kadoban wrote: post #91
dumbotron wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realizing no one's going to change a language with 900 million speakers, do you think it's because there's a lot of ambiguity, or is it because it's a cognitive load people aren't used to? Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese, and it has fewer tones. Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend. Edit: About languages losing features, English used t…

I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time. 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 w…

> I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time.

So there's this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdz5kCaCRFM

and more interestingly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#105

Post by throwaway2037 »

teleforce wrote: post #16

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…

There was a post on HN recently about the demise of speech recognition: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35800935

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.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#106

Post by hnfong »

dumbotron wrote: post #77
teleforce wrote: post #16

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…

I got curious about something with tonal languages: how are song melodies written for them. For some, the melody matched the tones of the word. Then there's Mandarin. Mandarin just follows the melody, and you can figure out the word by context. As an English speaker, this makes ~cents~ sense. Homophones aren't a big deal. If Mandarin doesn't need tones in lyrics, why does it need them normally?

Tangential fact - while, as you described, most popular songs in Cantonese have tones matching the melody (usually the melody is written first, then lyrics are filled in), many songs from Christian churches don't follow this practice. (I don't know why, maybe a lack of lyricists for translation from English/Latin to Cantonese during earlier years?)

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.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#107

Post by Umofomia »

dumbotron wrote: post #86
Gigablah wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because you can figure it out by context in songs (rarely upon the first listen, mind you), that doesn’t mean the added cognitive load isn’t excessively burdensome in everyday speech.

Realizing no one's going to change a language with 900 million speakers, do you think it's because there's a lot of ambiguity, or is it because it's a cognitive load people aren't used to? Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese, and it has fewer tones. Languages tend towards laziness, so I wonder if it settled on the right number, of if it's an ongoing trend. Edit: About languages losing features, English used t…

> Mandarin is a newer language than Cantonese

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...

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#108

Post by hnfong »

adastra22 wrote: post #66
Anon1096 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

早安 is made up of 2 characters but is a single word. If you fall into the trap of thinking 1 character = 1 word, you won't understand a thing. In this case you'd have thought it meant "early safe" instead of "good morning".

Chinese has pretty regular rules about grouping characters into words though, as most compounds are 2-characters, or a 4-character idiomatic phrase. Even if I know only half the characters in a sentence, I can usually guess the word boundaries correctly. It's not 100% reliable, but good enough to avoid confusion.

I guess it really depends on "dialect". Try that with Cantonese :)

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.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#109

Post by hnfong »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #93
qingcharles wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do any ideographic languages use spaces? I'm used to it in Asian languages but it still does my head in when I try to read older Latin documents.

How many (modern, written) "ideographic languages" exist? I can think of two: Chinese and Japanese. Old Korean and Vietnamese used some Chinese characters, but the modern languages use none. 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.

Comma is required in modern Chinese. Nobody will bother reading your text if you don't at least put some of them in the right places...

(I don't know Japanese so I can't speak to that)

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#110

Post by ackfoobar »

xbeta wrote: post #18
teleforce wrote: post #16

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…

Isn't true that Cantonese has 9 tones?

That's my favourite pet peeve.

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)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones

[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%8E%89#Pronunciation

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