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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#51

Post by Anon1096 »

eric-hu wrote: post #49
xvilka wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with Chinese language, thus lexing and parsing requires knowing many more words than in languages with spaces between words.

No, it's different between Chinese and Thai. Lexing is very clear in Chinese. It's never the case that you look at a Chinese sentence and don't know where a character ends and another begins. Take this sentence in both languages: "good morning, how are you" 早安，你好吗 This sentence clearly has "spaces" and I'm pretty sure any person illiterate in Chinese could tell you there are 5 characters / words. Technically the thir…

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".

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#52

Post by sundarurfriend »

postcynical wrote: post #25
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spaces between words is a relatively recent Irish invention (7th or 8th century) in western written language, so it’s not like it’s an obvious thing to have.

12 centuries should be plenty of time for a simple upgrade to improve the UX of a language.

The UX of a language for most people for most of that time was speech.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#53

Post by faitswulff »

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…

Hong Kong Cantonese has six tones. I knew it was different for Guangzhou Cantonese, but I wasn't sure exactly how many, so here's what Wikipedia says:

> In finals that end in a stop consonant, the number of tones is reduced to three; in Chinese descriptions, these "checked tones" are treated separately by diachronic convention, so that Cantonese is traditionally said to have nine tones. However, phonetically these are a conflation of tone and final consonant; the number of phonemic tones is six in Hong Kong and seven in Guangzhou.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#54

Post by geomark »

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.

yougetuseditafterawhile

The thing that bugs me about written Thai is that there are spaces now and then and you would expect them to be at sentence breaks but they seem to be randomly placed throughout the text, almost as if that's where the writer felt like he needed to take a breath instead of where one sentence ends and another begins.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#55

Post by Quiark »

lumb63 wrote: post #39

My girlfriend’s family strictly speaks Cantonese and I known nothing about it. I was just talking with a friend in a similar situation who lamented the lack of resources for Cantonese. This is awesome! Does anyone have any other hidden-gem Cantonese learning resources?

This may look like an ad but I was satisfied with Cantonese101 app (except for the stupid fact that flashcards are not in mobile app, only in the (responsive) web based app). I went through 2 "levels" but I failed to start using the language on a daily basis which is why I still don't really know it (my fault).

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#56

Post by eric-hu »

Anon1096 wrote: post #51
eric-hu wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's different between Chinese and Thai. Lexing is very clear in Chinese. It's never the case that you look at a Chinese sentence and don't know where a character ends and another begins. Take this sentence in both languages: "good morning, how are you" 早安，你好吗 This sentence clearly has "spaces" and I'm pretty sure any person illiterate in Chinese could tell you there are 5 characters / words. Technically the thir…

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".

Okay, you make a good point. Let's look back at the GGP's comment though:

> Same with Chinese language, thus lexing and parsing requires knowing many more words than in languages with spaces between words.

In English, can you get away with knowing the meaning of "good" and "morning" and not "good morning", and know that I'm greeting you instead of commenting on the quality of this morning?

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#57

Post by hnfong »

lumb63 wrote: post #39

My girlfriend’s family strictly speaks Cantonese and I known nothing about it. I was just talking with a friend in a similar situation who lamented the lack of resources for Cantonese. This is awesome! Does anyone have any other hidden-gem Cantonese learning resources?

Here's a side project of mine: https://cantowords.com/

It's an offshoot of https://words.hk (which has a Chinese interface). AFAIK we're the only modern Cantonese-Cantonese and Cantonese-English dictionary that is both comprehensive (50k+ entries) and word (詞) focused (i.e. not only explaining meaning of characters).

It's a huge undertaking, we've been on this for almost 10 years, and probably almost half-way done.

FWIW words.hk has quite a bit of traffic (from native/near-native speakers presumably) due to being well indexed by Google, but cantowords.com is relatively new and could benefit from more attention :)

PS: some of our content has made way to Cantonese dictionary apps as mentioned in sibling post(s), but the web site contains the most up to date content (which does get updated on a day to day basis as editing work proceeds)

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#58

Post by LAC-Tech »

gumby wrote: post #50
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…

> As many have pointed here Mandarin, Thai, Cantonese and Vietnam are tonal languages There are also plenty of tonal languages outside East/Southeast Asia, in South Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, and that's just ones I know of. Languages also switch, like ancient Greek.

Or indeed, ancient Chinese! Which IIRC was non tonal.

There's some linguistic pattern where consonant clusters at the end of words get dropped, but their 'effect' on the vowel remains and that's how these kind of tones develop.

IIRC there's also two different kind of tones, pitch tones, and register tones....

Languages are crazy.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#59

Post by panabee »

keyboard_smash wrote: post #37
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…

I make a Cantonese dictionary app for Windows/Mac/Linux, similar to Pleco (has multiple sources, coloured characters for tones, etc)! https://jyutdictionary.com/

awesome, just sent an email about potentially sponsoring this.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#60

Post by porphyra »

faitswulff wrote: post #53
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…

Hong Kong Cantonese has six tones. I knew it was different for Guangzhou Cantonese, but I wasn't sure exactly how many, so here's what Wikipedia says: > In finals that end in a stop consonant, the number of tones is reduced to three; in Chinese descriptions, these "checked tones" are treated separately by diachronic convention, so that Cantonese is traditionally said to have nine tones. However, phonetically these ar…

And to add to that, there are a bunch of sandhis, which are when the tones are shifted or modified when followed by certain other tones.

Using tones is so natural that many native Cantonese speakers are unaware that the language even has tones lol.

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