Hokkien transcription systems

[Aurelio]

Hi Henning:

Asking that kind of question will easily set off an e-mail war of numerous postings. Actually, that's not what I had in mind ... All I needed (and got) was a system for my PERSONAL use that allows me to put Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien on the same page without having to use three different romanization systems all the time. And since I'm using Hanyu Pinyin most of the time I'd like my other systems to comply with Hanyu Pinyin (how ever nonsensical that might be if one reads 'b, d, g &c.' with the values of the international phonetic alphabet).

I'm O.K. with "c, g, j, z" having different phonetic values in French, Italian and Spanish, so I guess I could also train myself to think in Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin, Yale for Cantonese and Church Romanization (or whatever) for Hokkien. But I don't really think that's going to make it any easier for me (take all the Germans pronouncing "school" as "shool" and "what" as "vat" because that's what 'SCH' and 'w' stand for in German as an example of what happens when things are spelled the same but pronounced differently).

In the end, I've always found it interesting how much dispute the issue of romanization produces: I would have thought that the true way to write Chinese was to use Chinese Characters and would regard romanization as only a tool for Sinologists and guai-lo learning the language. So, maybe you want to fight over simplified versus orthodox - but over romanization ...?

Regards,
Aurelio

[Dylan Sung]

Hi Aurelio,

烏 vu1 black

A Hakka input for free distribution, created by Dr. Lau Chunfat, appears in my website. It is available to view and download here

http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/sapienti/hagfa99b.htm

Dyl.

[:-)]

>>>Should add that I meant Hakka and not Cantonese having a real 'v'-sound ... Hope that's not too far off the mark (no clue of how to pronounce Hakka).

Yes, Standard Cantonese of the Pearl River Delta has no "v-" sound however, Western Cantonese (all the way to Haiphong, Vietnam) does have a "v-" sound. In most cases it is a substitution where Standard Pearl River Delta Cantonese uses "w-".

[Aurelio]

Hi :

Thanks for pointing that out. I thought I had seen e.g. "ving" for "wing" (eternal) before, but I checked the materials on Cantonese I had and didn't find anything about it.

Regards,
Aurelio

[:-)]

Aurelio,

The reason why your materials on Cantonese won't have such references is because there are sounds in Western Cantonese that are not represented in standard Cantonese of Guangzhou or Hong Kong.

In addition, Western Cantonese is not to be mistaken as one dialect but a collection of dialects as each villiage west of the Pearl River Delta to Haiphong, Vietnam will have it's own difang variation of western "Cantonese" which in most cases a person from Guangzhou, Hong Kong, & Macau will have an extreme difficulty in understanding.

The differences in the dialects of Western Cantonese is comparable to the differences in the dialects of Fujian.

[:-)]

"In the end, I've always found it interesting how much dispute the issue of romanization produces: I would have thought that the true way to write Chinese was to use Chinese Characters and would regard romanization as only a tool for Sinologists and guai-lo learning the language. So, maybe you want to fight over simplified versus orthodox - but over romanization ...?"


Aurelio,

Were you specifically refering to this dialog:

http://www.chinalanguage.com/forum/read ... 669&t=1661

[kaipi]

I have a couple of mainland dictionaries which employ this method of romanisation for pronunciation only, since they are Chinese-Chinese character dictionaries.