Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

People simply have a LOT of romanticized bullshit views built around Chinese characters, or the relative difficulty of different ways of writing because they're fluent in the language and have spent thousands of hours immersed in a sinograph-based writing system. Of course a different writing system is difficult to read even if it's ultimately much easier to learn, you have no practice! It's like writing English in Latin script vs. writing it in runes, both work fine, but we're practiced on recognizing words in Latin script. ᛖᛚᛞᛖᚱ ᚠᚢᚦᚨᚱᚲ, ᚾᛟᛏ ᛋᛟ ᛗᚢᚲᚺ.

Vietnamese is written in alphabet without issue. The Dungan people of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan even write their Mandarin-descended language with the Cyrillic script without any tone markings at all - the tones are supplied in a dictionary, but that's it. It works.

Most of the homophones etc. stuff come from people having decided that sinographs are good and then coming up with justifications for keeping them, not really an actual analysis whether Sinitic languages or Japanese would work without. This is a Chinese dictionary: https://imgur.com/a/rdxVh9i

> Mandarin can be written phonetically perfectly fine.

To reinforce this to the readers: https://www.pinyin.info/readings/pinyin_riji_duanwen.html

The author is a native Mandarin speaker who specifically requested that her work not be rendered in sinographs. It should be standard Pinyin orthography except that the author writes 'de' as 'd'.

Not sure what to post, but here are four interesting tidbits about Japanese pitch accent:

1) "Culminativity" is actually considered the most helpful functionality of the pitch accent. It helps making sense of word boundaries, as there can be only one prominent syllable per word. In spoken word of any language, there are no "spaces" (there are no spaces in written Japanese either, though), so languages need to provide accommodations for aural parsing strategies.

2) The other functionality provided by the pitch accent is distinctiveness, which means that there are some homonyms (similar-sounding words), that are only differentiated by the pitch accent. However, that is only a secondary functionality. In Mandarin Chinese, tones play a lot more important role for making sense of the meaning of the word. In Japanese, they play a role, but not a significant one. (There are some hundreds of minimal pair words that differ only by the pitch accent pattern, but as many regional dialects also have slightly different accent patterns, clearly 100% nailing the pattern isn't required for communication, as long as the general principles (such as one drop per word) are followed.)

3) Japanese is said to be an "isochronic" language, which means it has (or at least, is perceived to have) a simple integer-based rythm. For example, Haiku, a famous genre of Japanese poetry is based on these rythms, unit of which is called haku (拍) in Japanese or mora in Latin/English. In context of poetry metrics, mora is often misrepresented as a "syllable", but actually, there are uni- and bimoraic (and rarely, trimoraic) syllables in Japanese. An example: 2-mora "ma-to" means a target (in archery etc). 3-mora "ma-t-to" means a "mat/carpet". 3-mora "ma-n-to" means a cloak. 3-mora "ma-to-o" meas "let's wait". 3-mora "ma-to-n" means "mutton meat". 4-mora "ma-t-to-o" means "proper/straight". But every one of these are two-syllable words!

4) The rythm of Japanese speech is not concerned with the pitch accent prominence, unlike stress in English, which tends to make stressed syllables longer and louder (and more defined in vowel quality). Indeed, it is often said that "syllables" are an irrelevant concept for Japanese. However, phonologically that isn't true at all. The rythm of Japanese is indeed dependent mostly on moras, but the pitch accent patterns, where the prominent drop of pitch tends to happen, is highly dependent on syllable structure. It never happens on "weak" morae, which are called the "coda" or tail of the syllable. It always happens on the start of a syllable.

With the kind of mixed script used in Japan and that used to be used in Korea, they're not exactly necessary (still useful, but not necessary). Neither language uses prefixes much, so a sinograph is a pretty reliable indicator of the beginning of a word, followed by the inflection written out in a phonetic script like hiragana or hangeul. In Japanese's case, a switch from hiragana to katakana also indicates a word boundary and highlights that the word's likely a nonsinitic loan or the name of a plant or animal species or other technical term.

Say, for example:

"Korean people eat kimchi"

In Japanese/Korean, the structure would be:

Korean-person-topic marker-kimchi-object marker-eat-present tense.

In Japanese mixed script, that looks like:

韓国人はキムチを食べます。and would be read as "kankokujinwa kimuchiwo tabemasu".

Splitting it with spaces:

韓国人は キムチを 食べます。

The heftier kanji denoting "Korean person" and at the start of "eat" should be clear even to the untrained eye, while people who've studied the language can easily tell that キムチ is "kimuchi" written in katakana. The sentence is pretty easy to parse without spaces, at the cost of using one of the most insane writing systems in the world.

Now, what if we wrote the entire thing in hiragana instead?

かんこくじんはきむちをたべます。

... yyeaahh. Spaces. Please.

かんこくじんは きむちを たべます。There, much better, though almost no one fluent in Japanese has practice reading stuff like that.

In Korean, without spaces we'd have:

한국사람들은김치를먹어요. Again, similar problems. Korea has adopted spaces now that they don't use sinographs, so we'd have:

한국 사람들은 김치를 먹어요. (han'guk sa'ram'deul'eun kim'chi'reul mog'o'yo)

If we wrote "Korean person" with the same Sinitic loans in the Japanese sentence, we might get:

한국인들은 김치를 먹어요. (han'gug'in'deul'eun kim'chi'reul mog'o'yo)

Spaces clearly do help.

To clarify, I'm not saying that compound words are difficult to parse due to a lack of spaces. I'm saying that without any spaces in a sentence at all, it's harder to differentiate between compound and non-compound words.

blueberry vs. blue berry

stand up vs. standup

online vs. on line (northeast US term for queueing)

cartwheel vs. cart wheel

Stick compound words in a sentence that doesn't have any spaces at all, and you either have to pause to grok context, or context won't even help you (blue berry vs blueberry). At least German capitalizes all of its nouns, which would certainly help.

Compare this with Chinese, Korean, Japanese or other similar languages that don't use spaces at all (except perhaps after punctuation).

I use a similar one for Mandarin. Here's a cool little chrome extension I built to force the use of the font for all Hanzi/Han characters in a webpage.

```// This script changes the font of all Mandarin character on a page.

const url = chrome.runtime.getURL('font/Hanzi-Pinyin-Font.top.ttf');

const fontFace = ` @font-face { font-family: ZhongwenFont; src: url(${url}) } `;

window.onload = function () { const styleSheet = document.createElement("style"); styleSheet.innerHTML = fontFace document.head.appendChild(styleSheet); // For static pages, handle all elements: document.body.querySelectorAll("").forEach(handleElement); // support for dynamic pages // For dynamic apps, like Twitter, observe all DOM mutations henceforth within document body: addMutationObserver();

}

function handleText(textNode) { // Regular expression to match all Chinese characters const regex = /[\p{Script=Han}]+/gu; if (regex.test(textNode.nodeValue)) { const { style } = textNode.parentElement; style.fontFamily = 'ZhongwenFont'; style.fontSize = "large" } }

function addMutationObserver() { const observer = new MutationObserver(function (mutations) { mutations.forEach(function (mutation) { mutation.target.querySelectorAll("").forEach(handleElement); }); }); observer.observe(document.body, { subtree: true, childList: true }); }

function handleElement(e) { e.childNodes.forEach((child) => { if (child && !isUserInput(child) && child.nodeName === "#text") { handleText(child); } }); }

// Some helper functions used by the code above: function isUserInput(node) { const tagName = node.tagName ? node.tagName.toLowerCase() : ""; return ( tagName == "input" || tagName == "textarea" || isInsideContentEditable(node) ); }

function isInsideContentEditable(node) { while (node.parentNode) { if (node.contentEditable === "true") { return true; } node = node.parentNode; } return false; }```