Hangul for Cantonese

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The title of this video is "This Is Not Korean But It Is [recte Is It] Cantonese!? | Can We Use the Korean Alphabet to Write Cantonese?"

Well, if you can use Hangul for an Indonesian language, as with Cia-Cia (see "Selected readings" below), why not Cantonese?

As for the problem of tones, in my estimation it's the same as with Mandarin, namely, parsing and segmentation into suitable syntactic and lexical units.  If that is done carefully, rationally, and logically, homophony decreases drastically, to a degree that it is not much more of a problem than it is in English and many other languages, in which case context helps to solve most of the remaining ambiguities.

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to Alex Baumans]



3 Comments

  1. Benjamin E. Orsatti said,

    November 18, 2024 @ 9:31 am

    I watched the video, but am still a little foggy about what the proposal is to designate tones. He mentioned "numbers", so would it be something like: "재3빠2른6 갈4색4 여3우1가5[…]"?

  2. David Marjanović said,

    November 18, 2024 @ 4:06 pm

    Originally, Hangul came with tone marks for the four tones of Middle Sinitic and the three tones of Middle Korean. The six tones of Cantonese would still be a challenge, but I'm sure a Unicode-compliant solution could be found.

  3. David Marjanović said,

    November 18, 2024 @ 4:48 pm

    am still a little foggy about what the proposal is to designate tones

    The idea seems to be to use punctuation marks as tone marks (4:02–4:17).

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