Alphabetical transcriptions in Cantonese
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[This is a guest post by Till Kraemer]
I live in Hong Kong, and many things are fascinating here, especially the way they use English characters in Cantonese. Some very frequently used words (including tones and everything) don't have Chinese characters at all, like "hea" and "chur". Obviously it's colloquial, but this interesting Chinese/English mix goes as far as official names of movies:
Note that "快D" is Hong Kong's very common spelling for "hurry up" (again, I believe there is no equivalent Chinese character available for the "D", but there is definitely a tone to it – flat high, I would guess first tone in Cantonese).
I'm really curious if this kind of spelling fusion has happened anywhere else in the Sinosphere or even in East Asia!
Separate little treasure:
(source)
They managed to spell "Alexander" backwards and then transcribed it into Cantonese using an imaginary pronunciation of a non-existent word to guide their transcription I believe? Or do you think they may have used some kind of standard transcription method based on the most common English syllables? Is English standard enough for this?
Selected readings
- "Loose Romanization for Cantonese" (9/21/19)
- "Hong Kong protesters' argot" (9/7/19) — includes a long list of relevant posts
ycx said,
April 5, 2020 @ 4:09 pm
I believe "快D" (the D is also written as 啲) https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%95%B2 could be cognate with the Mandarin Chinese "快点" or the Beijing-accented "快点儿", since the two words have a similar pronunciation and are used in basically the same contexts.
Coby Lubliner said,
April 5, 2020 @ 4:43 pm
I am not sure what the writer means by "English" as distinct from Latin characters. If I am not mistaken, Cantonese uses the digraph eu (in names like Leung) to represent something like its French, not its English sound.
Victor Mair said,
April 5, 2020 @ 10:32 pm
From Bob Bauer:
The use of the English letter D in the written form of Hong Kong Cantonese was first described back in 1982:
Bauer, Robert S. 1982. D for two in Cantonese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 10.2:277-281.
Language Log readers may be interested to know that, in addition to English D, some other English letters have also been incorporated into the written form of Hong Kong Cantonese. This phenomenon and various other interesting aspects of Hong Kong’s written Cantonese have been examined in some detail in the following publication:
Bauer, Robert S. 2018. Cantonese as written language in Hong Kong. Global Chinese 4.1:103-142.
Victor Mair said,
April 5, 2020 @ 10:34 pm
From Pui Ling Tang:
In fact, we have a character for D, written as 啲. But it seems that people more prefer to use D recently, maybe because D is much simpler to write.
Ash said,
April 5, 2020 @ 10:38 pm
What does the author mean by "hea" and "chur"? I speak Cantonese and don't recognize these words. How are they used and in what context? Chances are there are Chinese characters that can be used. It's surprising that the author wouldn't know about D = 哋, since both are super common. This sounds like a question for Robert Bauer or Don Snow. Also, a good resource for looking up how things are written in Cantonese: http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/
Daniel Tse said,
April 7, 2020 @ 12:09 am
@Ash
'hea' (Jyutping he3) is pretty well-known in Cantonese. It does have a character 迆 but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone using that over 'hea'. An example would be 冇乜嘢做，hea下啫 "I don't have much to do, just relaxing a bit".
Ash said,
April 7, 2020 @ 12:36 am
@Daniel Tse:
Ah! I have a hard time with romanizations used by native Canto speakers. Like 'r' seems to be used to indicate a longer vowel (though I'm not 100% sure of that). http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk gives for he3, but I realize that there is often more than one way to write a given native Canto word with characters. Unfortunately, my copy of The Representation of Cantonese with Chinese Characters by Robert Bauer and Cheung Kwan-hin is in storage.