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Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

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Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#91

Post by kadoban »

dumbotron wrote: post #86
Gigablah wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I suspect what's going on here is that in music, it doesn't matter if you understand it right the first time.

How many songs do you misunderstand the lyrics for on the first few listens, in your native language? For me, in English, I either can't tell exactly what they're saying for some proportion of lyrics, or just totally mishear them _quite_ often (especially depending on the genre).

Music doesn't require every word to be perfectly understandable. Communication does, ideally.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#92

Post by hashmush »

dumbotron wrote: post #86
Gigablah wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

From my understanding Mandarin has a lot of two-syllable words and in many of the words the second syllable doesn't add much, if any, additional meaning.

Contrast that with Cantonese, which I believe still uses a single syllable for most words. (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong)

So it makes sense with less tones, because you have more syllables to disambiguate.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#93

Post by throwaway2037 »

qingcharles wrote: post #36
postcynical wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The annnoying part in written thai is thattherearenospacesbetweenwords.

Do any ideographic languages use spaces? I'm used to it in Asian languages but it still does my head in when I try to read older Latin documents.

How many (modern, written) "ideographic languages" exist? I can think of two: Chinese and Japanese. Old Korean and Vietnamese used some Chinese characters, but the modern languages use none.

It is interesting to me when written Chinese and Japanese use commas. It is pretty much never required, but pure style. It does help to breakup a complex sentence, similar to phonetic languages.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#94

Post by mahkeiro »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #21
postcynical wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The annnoying part in written thai is thattherearenospacesbetweenwords.

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.

Latin used dots to separate words.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#95

Post by Obsnold »

That looks good! I’ll have to give it a try. I’ve been trying to make some resources to encourage my son to pick up more from my wife and have been using hambaanglangs graphical generator[1]. It’s good but can be a bit fiddly to use.

[1] https://hambaanglaang.hk/software-tool/#GC%20Generator

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#96

Post by aksss »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #52
postcynical wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very true, and we should remember that in a lot of (all?) cultures across time, literacy (learning to read and write) was a marker of class, and/or a protected trade, and/or considered sacred, and/or considered profane.

In other words, there wasn’t much an incentive or recognized need to make the scribe’s job easy to pick up.

Caesar (I think) tells us that the druids of the Celts did not allow members of their tradition to write down their beliefs, traditions, etc. Writing in that context (prior to 50 BCE) was profane.

Of course, those of us in America are familiar with slaves being prevented from learning to read. Forced illiteracy in this context was a tool of oppression. [1]

I think in one of S.M. Sterling’s fictional books (On the Ocean of Eternity?? Part of the Island in the Sea of Time series, anyway) there’s a great exchange with a Babylonian scribe who laughs at the simplistic alphabet of the American, condescendingly remarking that child could learn that, to which the guy replied, yeah, that’s entirely the point!

1. https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/singleton/singleton.html

I can’t help but link this recollection by William Henry Singleton. He recounts being whipped as a child because it was thought that he had merely opened a book, but the whole pamphlet he authored(!) (and available to read in full at that link) after becoming free, fighting in the War, and learning to read/write, is an utterly fascinating account from a primary source spanning from his experience being born into slavery in about 1830 to the point where he authored this in about 1920. It’s too easy to understate but this man saw a lot of change in a momentous century, first-hand.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#97

Post by Umofomia »

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?

Interestingly, Cantonese songs tend to preserve tone better than songs sung in Mandarin. The paper "Tone and Melody in Cantonese" by Marjorie K.M. Chan [1] mentions the following:

> For Chinese, modern songs in Mandarin and Cantonese exhibit very different behaviour with respect to the extent to which the melodies affect the lexical tones. In modern Mandarin songs, the melodies dominate, so that the original tones on the lyrics seem to be completely ignored. In Cantonese songs, however, the melodies typically take the lexical tones into consideration and attempt to preserve their pitch contours and relative pitch heights.

[1] https://journals.linguisticsociety.org/proceedings/index.php...

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#98

Post by throwaway2037 »

porphyra wrote: post #60
faitswulff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your last point: I would say that is generally true for all native-level speakers of tonal languages. It is interesting to watch them try to learn a different tonal language. It suddenly opens all these doors into their own language. "Oh, so that's why foreigners struggle with this sound." Mandarin: zai, sai, cai

When you read about tonal languages online, there is so much emphasis on "tonal languages are special". I don't understand why accent and pitch isn't added to the same bucket. In Japanese, accent and pitch is rarely taught, but incredibly important in daily life. Japanese is stuffed full of homophones which makes listening a tricky matter. BTW -- I am sure there are other "non-tonal" languages that I don't know about where pitch and accent are important (Korean?).

If you consistently pronounce words with the wrong accent or pitch, (average, uptight) Japanese listeners will refuse to understand it. Say what you like about it (fake/real/whatever), it is a common response.

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#99

Post by throwaway2037 »

GolDDranks wrote: post #64
majou wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese has two tones, which is something I didn't know until recently.

This is not true in a strict sense; Standard Japanese has a pitch accent that has a "culminative" pitch countour over a word. Culminativity means that there is a single point of prominence at maximum. In Japanese, this gets realised as a drop in the pitch. (In variants of Japanese, there are more elaborare systems.) Tone systems are different in the sense that each syllable has it's own countour. (Of course, when rea…

    Disclosure: I am an expert in Japanese phonology, especially in pitch accent.
+9000. Please post more!

Re: Cantonese Font with Pronunciation

#100

Post by inkyoto »

xixixao wrote: post #90

I find it, well, outrageous, that Google translate doesn’t support Cantonese. Nationalism at its worst.

Google Board does, although the text input only. It support both, Yale and Jyutping, romanisations.

Microsoft Bing Translator does support Cantonese tho.

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