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A Note on Orthography and Transcription A Note on Orthography and Transcription there are two major problems with transcribing Cantonese speech on paper. The first is the lack of a fully standardized Cantonese script. In this book, I have done my best to produce the transcripts in ways that I think reflect common existing practices.I n 1999, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government published a Chinese character set known as the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (HKSCS). The latest version of the HKSCS (2001) contains 4,818 Chi- nese characters that are specific to the Hong Kong environment (Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government, Information Technol- ogy Services Department 2004). This character set can be seen as a first step toward a standardized Cantonese script. As a rule, all the characters used in my transcriptions are taken from the HKSCS. The second is the problem of romanization. Several romanization schemes for Cantonese are in circulation. The Yale and Meyer-Wempe systems appear to be the most commonly adopted in the English-language literature. In this book, I follow the new Cantonese Romanization Scheme, or Jyutping system, promoted by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. Jyutping is intuitive to Cantonese speakers. It is also convenient, because it is based solely on alphanumeric characters (unlike the Yale system, for example, which uses diacritics). But Jyutping is a relatively new system; readers who are familiar with the Yale system may find the new system difficult to follow in the beginning. The key features of the Jyutping sys- tem are the following. 1 . Consonants. In Cantonese, consonants (shown in Table 1), are di- vided into initial consonants, or onsets (those that occupy the initial position of a syllable), and final consonants, or codas (those that oc- cupy the final position of a syllable). The semivowels w- and j- also occur in the position of a consonant; w is pronounced much as it is xvii a note on orthography and transcription table 1 Initial consonants Unaspirated Aspirated Fricative Nasal Bilabial b p f m Alveolar d t s n/l Velar/glottal g k h ng Labiovelar gw kw Alveolar affricates z c source: Based on Yip and Matthews (2000: 1). Courtesy of Taylor and Francis Books, UK. in English. j is pronounced as a y in English. On the other hand, final consonants are further divided into two groups: (1) unreleased stops (-p, -t, -k) or (2) nasals (-m, -n, -ng). 2 . Vowels and Diphthongs. There are nine vowels, or what some lin- guists call nuclei, in the Cantonese system. These are a, aa, i, u, e, o, yu, eo (short), and oe (long). The first six are comparable to English vowels, whereas the last three are closer to French (cf. Yip and Mat- thews 2000). Diphthongs are produced by shifting from one vowel to another over the course of one syllable. In Cantonese, they include ai, aai, au, aau, iu, oi, ou, ei, ui, and eoi. 3 . Tone. Like other Chinese languages, Cantonese is tonal. According to the Cantonese Romanization Scheme, there are six common tones in the language. Each tone is represented by a numerical tone mark put at the end of a syllable: high level (1), high rising (2), midlevel (3), low falling (4), low rising (5), low level (6). For readers who speak Cantonese, I provide transcripts in original Cantonese to encourage alternative analyses. And to make this work more accessible to non-Cantonese speakers, I provide roman translitera- tions of the key phrases and terms in my discussions. (In the interest of space, I do not provide word-by-word romanization of my Cantonese transcripts.) I also choose not to provide transcripts that make use of technical symbols and features, hoping that the simpler form will make the book more readable. xviii a note on orthography and transcription Transcription aside, Putonghua pinyin is used in the text for standard Chinese terms. Jyutping is used for local terms in Hong Kong and names of people and places. Because many of these names and terms are used mainly in the context of Hong Kong, they would be incomprehensible if romanized as Putonghua. Finally, all English translations from the Cantonese were done by me. xix .
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