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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

visual-fonts.com

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#81

Post by dumbotron »

keyboard_smash wrote: post #74
donatj wrote: post #70

I honestly wonder how good of a job one could do with Chinese at making a font that just translated each character into English? Especially given modern font ligatures letting you change the meanings displayed based on context (the way things like Fira code do). Maybe don't even show the Chinese characters, just their meaning in English? It's obviously not going to be perfect, but I think there's potential there for…

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?

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#82

Post by Gigablah »

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?

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.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#83

Post by wpietri »

For those curious, the romanization system here is Jyutping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping

That's new to me; previously I had only seen Pinyin and Wade-Giles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade%E2%80%93Giles

Wikipedia has a nice article on the history and a number of other systems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#84

Post by wluu »

This is pretty good for someone who can speak Cantonese but can't read/write it.

As an example, I speak Mandarin and can't read/write (much) Chinese characters as I spoke it at home while growing up in Australia. So, I can imagine there'd be quite a lot who are in a similar situation to me but with Cantonese who would benefit from this (not just as a learning tool).

I've been using the Zhongwen[0] browser extension to "read" websites that have Chinese characters for many years as hovering over Chinese characters will display a popup with the pronunciation ping yin. It may not be the speediest way of understanding a block of Chinese text.

I could imagine someone creating a browser extension that would replace the font used on the website(s) with the Cantonese Visual Font when the extension is enabled.

[0] https://github.com/cschiller/zhongwen

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#85

Post by likpok »

eric-hu wrote: post #56
Anon1096 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Good morning is a bad example because it has a colloquial meaning that is a least a little idiomatic. Most other words/phrases in English don’t have this effect, while many Chinese words are like 早安. 了解, for example, can’t even be pronounced without correctly parsing the word.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#86

Post by dumbotron »

Gigablah wrote: post #82
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?

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 to be declined like German or Latin. Only pronouns are declined in modern English, and we don't usually teach it as "pronouns are declined."

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#87

Post by inkyoto »

ronyeh wrote: post #43
xbeta wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't true that Cantonese has 9 tones?

I like to tell complete newbies that Cantonese roughly has "4 tones." - High level - Mid level - Low (includes "low falling" and "low level") - Rising (includes "low rising" and "mid rising") I've combined similar tones into the Low and Rising categories. If you are a non-native Cantonese speaker, and don't differentiate between "low falling" and "low level", native Cantonese speakers will still understand you. It's…

> If you are a non-native Cantonese speaker, and don't differentiate between "low falling" and "low level", native Cantonese speakers will still understand you.

Whilst it is true that in the case of Cantonese some tones can be misused without the loss of the comprehension in a conversion, and the non-native speaker will still be understood if the surrounding context is clear and concise, that is not the case with the low falling tone, which is the most unforgiving of all. Cantonese speakers are prone to get thoroughly confused when the low falling tone is substituted for a flat low tone or a low rising one. Consider 墳墓 and 分母 when the context is insufficient to deduce which word was actually meant; it is perhaps not the best example but I can't think of a better one at the moment.

EDIT: 大麻, 大馬 and 大媽 from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35870392 are better examples.

> It's difficult for a non-native speaker to distinguish between "low rising" and "mid rising".... so just treat it as a rising tone. I'm a native speaker and sometimes I forget which type of rising tone a particular word is.... I didn't learn it that way, haha.

Most native speakers of tonal languages are not even aware of the fact their native language has tones. They don't think about it, they don't think about the tones. Tones are a concept for speakers of languages that do not have the tones in the first place.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#88

Post by keyboard_smash »

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?

Haha, yeah, works that way for Cantonese and Mandarin. 大麻 daai6 maa4/dà má (marijuana, literally ‘big numb’) vs 大馬 daai6 maa5/dà mǎ (big horse).

Bonus: 大媽 daai6 maa1/dà mā (auntie or father’s elder brother’s wife, literally ‘big mother’).

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#89

Post by larrysalibra »

hnfong wrote: post #57
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. F…

Cool! I made an effort to study Cantonese about 10 years ago and wish I'd come across these sites!

At the time, I heavily relied on another great Cantonese dictionary/resource site: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/

In addition to the Jyutping Cantonese pronunciation, it also shows corresponding Hanyu pinyin pronunciation for Mandarin. There are also number of learning resources on the site. I love how you can mouseover any character to get a pop up to learn more about the character - it's meaning as a single character, pronunciation, etc.

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