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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#151

Post by deadfoxygrandpa »

postcynical wrote: post #19
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…

The annnoying part in written thai is thattherearenospacesbetweenwords.

idk the more chinese i learn, the more im convinced that the very concept of individual words is blurred and not quite the same because of the way the writing system works

中国共产党, is that one word? should you break it up as 中国 共产党? what about 中国 共产 党? i dont think its nearly as clear which of these is correct as it is in english

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#152

Post by weregiraffe »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #130
Umofomia wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Stop embarassing yourself in public.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#153

Post by deadfoxygrandpa »

hnfong wrote: post #108
adastra22 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

i think you're on to something about cantonese, but it's also true of mandarin. segmentation of words in chinese in general seems inherently messier than segmentation in english. also look at stuff like abbreviations: is 北大 one word? is it an abbreviation for 北京大学 the same way Caltech is an abbreviation for california institute of technology? is it just two single character words, each of which is an abbreviation? i think its much less clear than english

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#154

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#155

Post by oefrha »

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…

You can even use Google Translate's text to speech API in whatever learning program you build for yourself:

  GET https://translate.google.com/translate_tts?ie=UTF-8&tl=zh_CN&client=tw-ob&q=
This returns an audio/mpeg (mp3) response. Change the language code as appropriate.

It's not the most natural sounding TTS engine, but it's free, unauthenticated and trivial to use.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#157

Post by akasakahakada »

Umofomia wrote: post #122
Symbiote wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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[…

Google translate Cantonese: 唔該你畀佢本書我

Real life Cantonese: 拎佢本書黎thx

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#158

Post by physicles »

Amazing. I started learning mandarin about 10 years ago, and spent a good deal of effort building flash cards where characters and accompanying pinyin were color coded by tone. If this font had existed then, I would've adapted it to mandarin and then used the shit out of it.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#159

Post by dry_soup »

tescocles wrote: post #144

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.

If you scroll down on the article in the OP, you'll see that Cantonese readings of Chinese characters are also context-specific, and they appear to have solved that problem with ligatures.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#160

Post by mchaver »

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…

There are language with even smaller sets of unique sounds that do not have tones like Hawaiian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_phonology

There are many common homophones in English that are distinguished by context. Conversation tends to have a lot of context. As a Mandarin speaker, I've never really experienced this context problem. You can make up some artificial examples in English and Chinese but they don't really reflect average communication. Like "The bat and the bow are on the table". It is important to know that a good percentage of words in Mandarin are multi-syllabic (not just one character).

Mandarin can be written phonetically perfectly fine. Currently the most popular systems are Hanyu Pinyin (used in China, Singapore and Malaysia) and Zhuyin (used in Taiwan). Kids learn these systems in school before they learn characters. Chinese characters have a strong historical and cultural value, that's why they are still around.

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