Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Don't Miss Out 唔 好 走 雞 呀
Recently, I borrowed an interesting book from the Oakland Chinatown library. Published in HK in 1983, it's called 廣 州 話 方 言 詞 典 (gong2 jau1 waa2 fong1 yin4 chi4 din2) Cantonese Dialect Dictionary. The book, which lists Cantonese dialectal words and sayings, includes the following information for each entry: the Chinese character(s), a Romanized pronunciation, and a definition in Chinese. Looking through the various pages, I can see many familiar words, such as the following example:
走 雞 zeo2 gei1 [jau2 gai1]
(1) 失 去 機 會: 唔 好 走 雞 呀 (不 要 失 去 機 會).
(2) 跑 掉: 吼 住 佢, 唔 好 畀 佢 走 雞 (守 着 他, 別 讓 他 跑 掉).
Although the book is fun, I can see two weak points. First, it's 20 years old and does not cover much of the new slang now popular in HK. Second, it uses a weird Romanization system that is hard to decipher and pronounce.
Speaking of Romanization, I have mentioned before that there are two main systems for Romanizing Cantonese. The first is the Yale system. The second is the Jyutping system 粵 拼. The Yale system supposedly is the easiest for American speakers, because it most resembles English spelling and sounds. That's the system I use to Romanize Chinese words in this blog. But to keep things simple, I use the tone numbers (1-6) instead of using tone marks and adding "h" for the lower tones. I tend to avoid the Jyutping system, because it seems unnatural to me. For example, using "j" to represent the "y" sound, "c" to represent the "ch" sound, and "z" to represent the "j" or "ts" sound just confuses me.
When I first started studying Cantonese years ago, I mainly studied Romanization and didn't worry about Chinese characters. However, written Cantonese has come a long way in the last 20 years. As Cantonese language websites, message boards, chatrooms, SMSing, etc. have become more common, the written language has proliferated. It's now much more important to learn Cantonese characters than it was in the past. ¶ 9:00 PM
走 雞 zeo2 gei1 [jau2 gai1]
(1) 失 去 機 會: 唔 好 走 雞 呀 (不 要 失 去 機 會).
(2) 跑 掉: 吼 住 佢, 唔 好 畀 佢 走 雞 (守 着 他, 別 讓 他 跑 掉).
Although the book is fun, I can see two weak points. First, it's 20 years old and does not cover much of the new slang now popular in HK. Second, it uses a weird Romanization system that is hard to decipher and pronounce.
Speaking of Romanization, I have mentioned before that there are two main systems for Romanizing Cantonese. The first is the Yale system. The second is the Jyutping system 粵 拼. The Yale system supposedly is the easiest for American speakers, because it most resembles English spelling and sounds. That's the system I use to Romanize Chinese words in this blog. But to keep things simple, I use the tone numbers (1-6) instead of using tone marks and adding "h" for the lower tones. I tend to avoid the Jyutping system, because it seems unnatural to me. For example, using "j" to represent the "y" sound, "c" to represent the "ch" sound, and "z" to represent the "j" or "ts" sound just confuses me.
When I first started studying Cantonese years ago, I mainly studied Romanization and didn't worry about Chinese characters. However, written Cantonese has come a long way in the last 20 years. As Cantonese language websites, message boards, chatrooms, SMSing, etc. have become more common, the written language has proliferated. It's now much more important to learn Cantonese characters than it was in the past. ¶ 9:00 PM
