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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#141

Post by xept »

maartenpi_ wrote: post #113
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've learned to speak some Mandarin. What helped me a lot while talking is using Google's Translate function to see if I get the tone right. It's free and fast. It's very helpful when you want quick feedback. I learned a lot from it about the pronunciation of consonants as well. The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound. I just came back from a trip to China and…

What Google's Translate function are you talking about? Voice input?

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#142

Post by gondaloof »

nagarjun wrote: post #118

This is great! Desperately need this for Japanese!

I'm confident that either this already exists in Japanese or that apps/tools can do it.

Japanese Children learn Kanji with Furigana, so there are solutions for them.

Some examples I found:

- https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-furigana-phon...

- http://www.furiganizer.com/static/about.html

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fmw2IrRUXo

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#143

Post by lordnacho »

xept wrote: post #141
maartenpi_ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've learned to speak some Mandarin. What helped me a lot while talking is using Google's Translate function to see if I get the tone right. It's free and fast. It's very helpful when you want quick feedback. I learned a lot from it about the pronunciation of consonants as well. The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound. I just came back from a trip to China and…

What Google's Translate function are you talking about? Voice input?

When you look up a word there's a speaker icon that you press to hear the translated words.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#144

Post by tescocles »

This wouldn't work in the same way in Japanese because characters can have different readings depending on the context. Could that be overcome with font ligatures? Still, even if we could overcome that massively complex task, some groups of characters (i.e. the aforementioned context) can still have multiple ways of reading them.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#145

Post by lordnacho »

panabee wrote: post #31

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…

What I'm after is a resource for learning mandarin of you're already a speaker of Cantonese.

I've found it surprisingly hard to find a summary of the differences.

By contrast learning German from Danish seemed to have some bits that made it clear reasonably fast.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#146

Post by eloisius »

dumbotron wrote: post #81
keyboard_smash wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like with any language, there’s gonna be a lot of context-dependent words/phrases with multiple meanings that are hard to segment/parse/translate correctly. Things like DeepL or GTranslate take into account probabilities for segmentation and grammar (or use ICU libraries); but that’s harder to do from a context of using ligatures and basic font engine features. e.g. The classic example is 大麻煩 - is it 大|麻煩 (a big inco…

Marijuana literally means "big numb" in Chinese? Or "big horse" if I mispronounce it?

麻 isn’t always numb. It’s also a genetic term for all kinds of flax or fiberous plants like hemp. For example sesame is 芝麻.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#147

Post by OJFord »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #138
OJFord wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Why would a small number of letters make English need more syllables? If anything, letters being overloaded limits the number of syllables we can express.

I was mostly just joking/pointing out that the comparison's a bit.. not to say 'apples and oranges', but a bit arbitrary, it seemed to me could just as well be comparing letter count - or even that that makes more sense as a comparison for (disregarding tone) characters, but still arbitrary, the languages just work differently.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#148

Post by peterfirefly »

maartenpi_ wrote: post #113
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've learned to speak some Mandarin. What helped me a lot while talking is using Google's Translate function to see if I get the tone right. It's free and fast. It's very helpful when you want quick feedback. I learned a lot from it about the pronunciation of consonants as well. The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound. I just came back from a trip to China and…

> The k-sound has way more air in it. You need to pronounce it as "kh". Same thing with the t-sound.

Well, if you are Dutch, all other consonants from all other languages need a lot more aspiration ;)

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#149

Post by jfk13 »

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…

This is an awesome piece of work - congratulations!

I notice you're using OpenType-SVG here; have you investigated whether it would be possible to implement this using COLRv1 (which would potentially result in a lighter-weight font, I suspect, and eventually wider support)? Or are there technical limitations in COLRv1 that make it impossible?

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#150

Post by carlmr »

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…

>Most Mandarin words are disyllabic or longer, and 400×400 = 160k is enough combinations for a quite large vocabulary.

While true, I'd bet that some combinations dominate because they sound better/are easier to pronounce.

Also just because you can technically differentiate 160k sound pairs doesn't mean you can do it in a noisy environment.

Japanese and Korean have a similarly limited number of syllables and have very long words compared to English. I'm guessing because they don't have tones.

If you look at communication theory you don't only need distinct sounds, you also need error correction. Which requires extra bits of redundant information.

Tones just make it possible to carry extra bits.

Longer strings of syllables like in Japanese and Korean do the same.

More complex syllables, like in English, too.

It's just multiple different ways of carrying enough bits in speech to work in a noisy environment.

Another analogy could be password strength. You can have a very long numeric password (Japanese & Korean), A password with a mix of a-zA-Z0-9 of medium length (English). A password with weird special characters but shorter (Chinese), and they all end up having the same entropy (given that the password rules are known to the attacker).

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