Cantonese uses about 1,760 syllables to cover pronunciations of more than 10,000 Chinese characters. Most syllables are represented by standard Chinese characters, however a few are written with colloquial Cantonese characters. Cantonese has relatively simple syllable structure when compared to other languages. A Cantonese syllable contains one tone-carrying vowel with up to one consonant on either side.[1][failed verification] The average Cantonese syllable represents 6 unique Chinese characters.
Sounds
A Cantonese syllable usually includes an initial (onset) and a final (rime/rhyme). The Cantonese syllabary has about 630 syllables.
Some like /kʷeŋ˥/ (扃), /ɛː˨/ and /ei˨/ (欸) are no longer common; some like /kʷek˥/ and /kʷʰek˥/ (隙), or /kʷaːŋ˧˥/ and /kɐŋ˧˥/ (梗), have traditionally had two equally correct pronunciations but its speakers are starting to pronounce them in only one particular way (and this usually happens because the unused pronunciation is almost unique to that word alone), making the unused sounds effectively disappear from the language; some like /kʷʰɔːk˧/ (擴), /pʰuːi˥/ (胚), /tsɵi˥/ (錐), /kaː˥/ (痂), have alternative nonstandard pronunciations which have become mainstream (as /kʷʰɔːŋ˧/, /puːi˥/, /jɵi˥/ and /kʰɛː˥/ respectively), again making some of the sounds disappear from the everyday use of the language; and yet others like /faːk˧/ (謋), /fɐŋ˩/ (揈), /tɐp˥/ (耷) have become popularly (but erroneously) believed to be made-up/borrowed words to represent sounds in modern vernacular Cantonese when they have in fact been retaining those sounds before these vernacular usages became popular.
On the other hand, new words circulate in Hong Kong which use combinations of sounds unseen in Cantonese prior to their introduction, like /kɛt˥/, a syllable which was borrowed from the English word get, in the meaning "to understand". This /ɛt/ final does not fit into general Cantonese phonology, though the final with the longer vowel -et/ɛːt/ has appeared in vernacular Cantonese before this, e.g. pet6/pʰɛːt˨/坺, the measure word for gooey or sticky substances like mud, poop, glue, chewing gum.
Initial consonants
Initials (or onsets) refer to the 19 initial consonants which may occur at the beginning of a syllable. Some syllables have no initials and are said to have null initial. The following is the inventory for Cantonese as represented in IPA:
1 2 3 In casual speech, many native speakers do not distinguish between /n/ and /l/, nor between /ŋ/ and the null initial.[2] Usually they pronounce only /l/ and the null initial. See the discussion on phonological shift below.
1 2 3 4 Some linguists prefer to analyze /j/ and /w/ as part of finals to make them analogous to the /i/ and /u/medials in Mandarin, especially in comparative phonological studies. However, since final-heads only appear with null initial, /k/ or /kʰ/, analyzing them as part of the initials greatly reduces the count of finals at the cost of adding only four initials.
↑ Some linguists analyze a /ʔ/ (glottal stop) in place of the null initial when a vowel begins a syllable.
Coronals' position varies from dental to alveolar, with /t/ and /tʰ/ more likely to be dental. Coronal affricates and sibilants/t͡s/, /t͡sʰ/, /s/'s position is alveolar and articulatory findings indicate they are palatalized before close front vowels /iː/ and /yː/.[3] Affricates /t͡s/ and /t͡sʰ/ also have a tendency to palatalize before central round vowels /œː/ and /ɵ/.[4] Historically, another alveolo-palatal sibilant series existed as discussed below.
Vowels and finals
Chart of monophthongs used in Cantonese, from Zee (1999:59)
Chart of diphthongs used in Cantonese, from Zee (1999:59)
Finals (or rimes/rhymes) are the part of the sound after the initial. A final is typically composed of a main vowel (nucleus) and a terminal (coda).
Eleven vowel analysis
As the traditionally transcribed near-close finals ([ɪŋ],[ɪk],[ʊŋ],[ʊk]) have been found to be pronounced in the mid region on acoustic findings,[5] sources like Bauer & Benedict (1997:46–47) prefer to analyze them as close-mid ([eŋ],[ek],[oŋ],[ok]) which results in eleven vowel phonemes. In this analysis, vowel length is a key contrastive feature of the vowels.
Some sources prefer to keep the near-close finals ([ɪŋ],[ɪk],[ʊŋ],[ʊk]) as traditionally transcribed and analyze the long-short pairs [ɛː,e], [ɔː,o], [œː,ɵ], [iː,ɪ] and [uː,ʊ] as allophones of the same phonemes, resulting in an eight vowel system instead.[7] In this analysis, vowel length is mainly allophonic and is contrastive only in the open vowels.
Note:abcde Finals /ɛːu/,[8]/ɛːm/, /ɛːn/, /ɛːp/ and /ɛːt/ only appear in colloquial pronunciations of characters.[9] They are absent from some analyses and romanization systems.
Diphthongal ending /i/ is rounded after rounded vowels.[8] Nasal consonants can occur as base syllables in their own right and are known as syllabic nasals. The stop consonants (/p,t,k/) are unreleased ([p̚,t̚,k̚]).
Relative fundamental-frequency contours for six Cantonese tones with examples and Jyutping/Yale tone numbers (modified from Francis (2008))
Cantonese uses tone contours to distinguish words, with the number of possible tones depending on the type of final. While Guangzhou Cantonese generally distinguishes between high-falling and high level tones, the two have merged in Hong Kong Cantonese and Macau Cantonese, yielding a system of six different tones in syllables ending in a semi-vowel or nasal consonant. (Some of these have more than one realization, but such differences are not used to distinguish words.) 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 are a conflation of tone and final consonant; the number of phonemic tones is six in Hong Kong and seven in Guangzhou.[10]
For purposes of meters in Chinese poetry, the first and fourth tones are "flat/level tones" (平聲), while the rest are "oblique tones" (仄聲). This follows their regular evolution from the four tones of Middle Chinese.
The first tone can be either high level or high falling usually without affecting the meaning of the words being spoken. Most speakers are in general not consciously aware of when they use and when to use high level and high falling. Most Hong Kong speakers have merged the high level and high falling tones. In Guangzhou, the high falling tone is disappearing as well, but is still prevalent among certain words, e.g. in traditional Yale Romanization with diacritics, sàam (high falling) means the number three 三, whereas sāam (high level) means shirt 衫.[11]
The relative pitch of the tones varies with the speaker; consequently, descriptions vary from one source to another. The difference between high and mid level tone (1 and 3) is about twice that between mid and low level (3 and 6): 60Hz to 30Hz. Low falling (4) starts at the same pitch as low level (6), but then drops; as is common with falling tones, it is shorter than the three level tones. The two rising tones, (2) and (5), both start at the level of (6), but rise to the level of (1) and (3), respectively.[12]
The tone 3, 4, 5 and 6 are dipping in the last syllable when in an interrogative sentence or an exclamatory sentence. 眞係? "really?" is pronounced [tsɐn˥hɐi˨˥].
The numbers "394052786" when pronounced in Cantonese, will give the nine tones in order (Romanization (Yale) saam1, gau2, sei3, ling4, ng5, yi6, chat7, baat8, luk9), thus giving a mnemonic for remembering the nine tones.
Like other Yue dialects, Cantonese preserves an analog to the voicing distinction of Middle Chinese in the manner shown in the chart below.
Middle Chinese
Cantonese
Tone
Initial
Nucleus
Tone Name
Tone Contour
Tone Number
Level
voiceless
dark level
˥,˥˧
1
voiced
light level
˨˩,˩
4
Rising
voiceless
dark rising
˧˥
2
voiced
light rising
˩˧
5
Departing
voiceless
dark departing
˧
3
voiced
light departing
˨
6
Entering
voiceless
Short
upper dark entering
˥
7 (1)
Long
lower dark entering
˧
8 (3)
voiced
light entering
˨
9 (6)
The distinction of voiced and voiceless consonants found in Middle Chinese was preserved by the distinction of tones in Cantonese. The difference in vowel length further caused the splitting of the dark entering tone, making Cantonese (as well as other Yue Chinese branches) one of the few Chinese varieties to have further split a tone after the voicing-related splitting of the four tones of Middle Chinese.[13][14]
Cantonese is special in the way that the vowel length can affect both the rime and the tone. Some linguists[who?] believe that the vowel length feature may have roots in the Old Chinese language.
It also has two changed tones, which add the diminutive-like meaning "that familiar example" to a standard word. For example, word for "silver" (銀, /ŋɐn˩/) in a modified tone (/ŋɐn˩꜔꜒/, riɡht-facinɡ tone bars denote chanɡed tones) means "coin". They are comparable to the diminutive suffixes 兒 and 子 of Mandarin. In addition, modified tones are used in compounds, reduplications (擒擒青/kɐm˩ kɐm˩ tʃʰɛːŋ˥/→/kɐm˩ kɐm˩꜔꜒ tʃʰɛːŋ˥/ "in a hurry") and direct address to family members (妹妹/muːy˨ muːy˨/→/muːy˨꜖ muːy˨꜔꜒/ "sister").[15] The two modified tones are high level, like tone 1, and mid rising, like tone 2, though for some people not as high as tone 2. The high level changed tone is more common for speakers with a high falling tone; for others, mid rising (or its variant realization) is the main changed tone, in which case it only operates on those syllables with a non-high level and non-mid rising tone (i.e. only tones 3, 4, 5 and 6 in Yale and Jyutping romanizations may have changed tones).[16] However, in certain specific vocatives, the changed tone does indeed result in a high level tone (tone 1), including speakers without a phonemically distinct high falling tone.[17]
Historical change
Like other languages, Cantonese sounds are constantly changing, processes where more and more native speakers of a language change the pronunciations of certain sounds.
One shift that affected Cantonese in the past was the lost distinction between alveolar and alveolo-palatal (sometimes termed as postalveolar) sibilants which occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many Cantonese dictionaries and pronunciation guides published prior to the 1950s documented this distinction but it is no longer distinguished in any modern Cantonese dictionary.
Publications that documented this distinction include:
Williams, S., A Tonic Dictionary of the Chinese Language in the Canton Dialect, 1856.
Cowles, R., A Pocket Dictionary of Cantonese, 1914.
The sibilants depalatalized, causing many words that were once distinct to sound the same. For comparison, modern Standard Mandarin still has this distinction, with most Cantonese alveolo-palatal sibilants corresponding to Mandarin retroflex sibilants. For instance:
Even though the aforementioned references observed the distinction, most of them also noted that the depalatalization phenomenon was already occurring at the time. Williams (1856) writes:
The initials ch and ts are constantly confounded, and some persons are absolutely unable to detect the difference, more frequently identifying the words under ts as ch, than contrariwise.
Cowles (1914) adds:
"s" initial may be heard for "sh" initial and vice versa.
A vestige of this palatalization difference is sometimes reflected in the romanization scheme used to romanize Cantonese names in Hong Kong. For instance, many names are spelled with sh even though the "sh sound" (/ɕ/) is no longer used to pronounce the word. Examples include the surname 石 (/sɛːk˨/), which is often romanized as Shek, and the names of places like Sha Tin (沙田; /saː˥tʰiːn˩/).
The alveolo-palatal sibilants occur in complementary distribution with the retroflex sibilants in Mandarin, with the alveolo-palatal sibilants only occurring before /i/ or /y/. However, Mandarin also retains the medials, where /i/ and /y/ can occur, as can be seen in the examples above. Cantonese had lost its medials sometime ago in its history, reducing the ability for speakers to distinguish its sibilant initials.
Many modern-day younger Hong Kong speakers do not distinguish between phoneme pairs like /n/ vs. /l/ and /ŋ/ vs. null initial[2] and merge one sound into another. Examples for this include 你/nei˨˧/ being pronounced as /lei˨˧/, 我/ŋɔː˨˧/ being pronounced as /ɔː˨˧/. Another incipient sound change is the lost distinctions /kʷ/ vs. /k/ and /kʷʰ/ vs. /kʰ/, for example 國/kʷɔːk˧/ being pronounced as [kɔːk̚˧].[18] Although that is often considered substandard and denounced as "lazy sounds/pronunciation" (懶音), it is becoming more common and is influencing other Cantonese-speaking regions (see Hong Kong Cantonese).[citation needed]
Assimilation also occurs in certain contexts: 肚餓 is sometimes read as [tʰoŋ˩˧ŋɔː˨] not [tʰou̯˩˧ŋɔː˨], 雪櫃 is sometimes read as [sɛːk˧kʷɐi̯˨] not [syːt˧kʷɐi̯˨], but sound change of these morphemes are limited to that word.[citation needed]
Mandarin is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China and Taiwan. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China and Taiwan. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language. Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers.
Yue is a branch of the Sinitic languages primarily spoken in Southern China, particularly in the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi.
Middle Chinese or the Qieyun system (QYS) is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the Qieyun, a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the preface of the Qieyun, most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology.
The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme, also known as Jyutping, is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed in 1993 by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK).
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits. In the education field it is variously called a consonant cluster or a consonant blend.
Taishanese, alternatively romanized in Cantonese as Toishanese or Toisanese, in local dialect as Hoisanese or Hoisan-wa, is a Yue Chinese dialect native to Taishan, Guangdong.
Postalveolar (post-alveolar) consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge. Articulation is farther back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate, the place of articulation for palatal consonants. Examples of postalveolar consonants are the English palato-alveolar consonants, as in the words "ship", "'chill", "vision", and "jump", respectively.
Historical Chinese phonology deals with reconstructing the sounds of Chinese from the past. As Chinese is written with logographic characters, not alphabetic or syllabary, the methods employed in Historical Chinese phonology differ considerably from those employed in, for example, Indo-European linguistics; reconstruction is more difficult because, unlike Indo-European languages, no phonetic spellings were used.
In phonetics, alveolo-palatal consonants, sometimes synonymous with pre-palatal consonants, are intermediate in articulation between the coronal and dorsal consonants, or which have simultaneous alveolar and palatal articulation. In the official IPA chart, alveolo-palatals would appear between the retroflex and palatal consonants but for "lack of space". Ladefoged and Maddieson characterize the alveolo-palatals as palatalized postalveolars, articulated with the blade of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge and the body of the tongue raised toward the palate, whereas Esling describes them as advanced palatals (pre-palatals), the furthest front of the dorsal consonants, articulated with the body of the tongue approaching the alveolar ridge. These descriptions are essentially equivalent, since the contact includes both the blade and body of the tongue. They are front enough that the fricatives and affricates are sibilants, the only sibilants among the dorsal consonants.
The Hong Kong Government uses an unpublished system of Romanisation of Cantonese for public purposes which is based on the 1888 standard described by Roy T Cowles in 1914 as Standard Romanisation. The primary need for Romanisation of Cantonese by the Hong Kong Government is in the assigning of names to new streets and places. It has not formally or publicly disclosed its method for determining the appropriate Romanisation in any given instance.
Guangdong Romanization refers to the four romanization schemes published by the Guangdong Provincial Education Department in 1960 for transliterating Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese. The schemes utilized similar elements with some differences in order to adapt to their respective spoken varieties.
Proper Cantonese pronunciation is a campaign in Hong Kong started from the 1980s and led by scholar Richard Ho (何文匯) to promote the "proper pronunciation" in the Cantonese language. The prescriptive nature of the campaign has led to controversies.
General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese.
Wong Shik Ling published a scheme of phonetic symbols for Cantonese based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in the book A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton. The scheme has been widely used in Chinese dictionaries published in Hong Kong. The scheme, known as S. L. Wong system (黃錫凌式), is a broad phonemic transcription system based on IPA and its analysis of Cantonese phonemes is grounded in the theories of Y. R. Chao.
A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the phonetic sense but rather a type of syllable that ends in a stop consonant or a glottal stop. Separating the checked tone allows -p, -t, and -k to be treated as allophones of -m, -n, and -ng, respectively, since they are in complementary distribution. Stops appear only in the checked tone, and nasals appear only in the other tones. Because of the origin of tone in Chinese, the number of tones found in such syllables is smaller than the number of tones in other syllables. Chinese phonetics have traditionally counted them separately.
Wong Shik-Ling published a romanisation scheme accompanying a set of phonetic symbols for Cantonese based on International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in the book A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced according to the Dialect of Canton.
Hong Kong Cantonese is a dialect of the Cantonese language (廣東話，粵語), which is in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Cantonese is lingua franca of populations living in the Guangdong Province of mainland China, in the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in many overseas Chinese communities. Hong Kong Cantonese shares a recent and direct lineage with the Guangzhou (Canton) dialect of Cantonese (廣州話); decades of separation have led to some deviations between Hong Kong Cantonese and Guangzhou Cantonese in terms of vocabulary and other noticeable speech habits, although Hong Kong officially maintains the Guangzhou dialect and pronunciations as the official language standard. Hongkongers refer to the language as "Cantonese" (廣東話).
The phonology of Standard Chinese has historically derived from the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. However, pronunciation varies widely among speakers, who may introduce elements of their local varieties. Television and radio announcers are chosen for their ability to affect a standard accent. Elements of the sound system include not only the segments—e.g. vowels and consonants—of the language, but also the tones applied to each syllable. In addition to its four main tones, Standard Chinese has a neutral tone that appears on weak syllables.
In Middle Chinese, the phonological system of medieval rime dictionaries and rime tables, the final is the rest of the syllable after the initial consonant. This analysis is derived from the traditional Chinese fanqie system of indicating pronunciation with a pair of characters indicating the sounds of the initial and final parts of the syllable respectively, though in both cases several characters were used for each sound. Reconstruction of the pronunciation of finals is much more difficult than for initials due to the combination of multiple phonemes into a single class, and there is no agreement as to their values. Because of this lack of consensus, understanding of the reconstruction of finals requires delving into the details of rime tables and rime dictionaries.
ISO 11940-2 is an ISO standard for a simplified transcription of the Thai language into Latin characters.
Francis, Alexander L. (2008), "Perceptual learning of Cantonese lexical tones by tone and non-tone language speakers", Journal of Phonetics, 36 (2), Elsevier: 268–294, doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2007.06.005
Zee, Eric (1999), "Chinese (Hong Kong Cantonese)"(PDF), Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A guide to the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN978-0-521-65236-0
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