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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#121

Post by creamyhorror »

jkwchui wrote: post #114
rahimnathwani wrote: post #9

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…

Hello. Font's author here. You and Jeff are correct in guessing this is (ab)using ligatures maximally :) To satisfy your curiosity, we can go deeper. ---- 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…

That is amazing work. You've really plumbed the depths of what's possible with font technology, kudos.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#122

Post by Umofomia »

Symbiote wrote: post #112
xixixao wrote: post #90

I find it, well, outrageous, that Google translate doesn’t support Cantonese. Nationalism at its worst.

Isn't it listed as "Chinese Traditional"?

No, "Chinese Traditional" refers to the character set used to write each character[1], but the actual text is still written according with the vocabulary and grammar of Standard Written Chinese, which is based on spoken Mandarin.

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

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#123

Post by yorwba »

ddeck wrote: post #101
dumbotron wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having few unique syllables doesn't mean tones are required, since syllables can be combined. Most Mandarin words are disyllabic or longer, and 400×400 = 160k is enough combinations for a quite large vocabulary.

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.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#124

Post by ackfoobar »

likpok wrote: post #13
Keyframe wrote: post #11

I 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…

> There are some tricky ones: the 'c' in cat is pronounced more like an aspirated 'ts'.

I would be perfectly happy if a non-native speaker pronounces "c" and "z" like the English "ch" and soft "g".

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#125

Post by gweilo84638 »

Funded by ... a dance studio! How wonderful. I walked past it the other day. Perhaps I'll pay them back for funding the creation of this font by taking a Tango class :)

> 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

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#126

Post by ackfoobar »

jkwchui wrote: post #114
rahimnathwani wrote: post #9

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…

Hello. Font's author here. You and Jeff are correct in guessing this is (ab)using ligatures maximally :) To satisfy your curiosity, we can go deeper. ---- 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…

In the FAQ you mentioned

> 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?

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#127

Post by mchaver »

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…

Languages often lose features but they also gain features. Complexity of language is hard to compare, but we can still find many examples.

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.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#128

Post by Umofomia »

yorwba wrote: post #123
ddeck wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having few unique syllables doesn't mean tones are required, since syllables can be combined. Most Mandarin words are disyllabic or longer, and 400×400 = 160k is enough combinations for a quite large vocabulary. 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 ambigu…

Evidence that Chinese can be perfectly understandable written without the use of characters can be seen in the Dungan language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language), which can be considered a dialect of Mandarin Chinese, but is written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

> 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.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#129

Post by OJFord »

ddeck wrote: post #101
dumbotron wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Sure, but English needs them because there are only around 26 letters; compare this to Mandarin, where estimates are in the 400 range.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#130

Post by ngcc_hk »

Umofomia wrote: post #107
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…

> 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 Tan…

Just like human are newer than, say, some monkey because it comes later, even we evolve from same ancestor, is a matter of fact. The recitation of tang poetry and more complicated speak a lot of this. Mandarin is later.
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