41.1. Cantonese (广东话)
Spoken in Guangdong Province (广东省, Canton) unsurprisingly.
Interintelligibility of written text with Mandarin:
They don’t have a standardized pinyin/romanization/transliteration, it is quite insane:
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping (https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/香港語言學學會粵語拼音方案, 粵拼) this appears to be the dominating one, at least it is on Wikipedia. So I’m in for it.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_Transliteration_Scheme
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Government_Cantonese_Romanisation
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Cantonese
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but most schemes are quite similar it seems.
6 tones, though average speakers themselves can’t tell the tone of each character because it is not taught in school: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cantonese-tones-explained-nicholas-angiers/.
They actually have two different rising and three different level tones, which is completely insane, how can you differentiate that??
Some people count 9 due to syllables that end in p, t or k and which can only have 3 of the previous 6, but better just group those three with the corresponding of the other 6.
No "turn around the middle" tones though. So a common notation is start point to end point:
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55 high level
-
35 mid rising
-
33 mid level
-
21 low falling
-
22 low level
-
23 low rising
There was also a high falling 52/53 but it merged with 55 in Hong Kong, so it is not normally noted anymore.
Spoken in Guangdong Province (广东省, Canton) unsurprisingly.
Interintelligibility of written text with Mandarin:
They don’t have a standardized pinyin/romanization/transliteration, it is quite insane:
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyutping (https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/香港語言學學會粵語拼音方案, 粵拼) this appears to be the dominating one, at least it is on Wikipedia. So I’m in for it.
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_Transliteration_Scheme
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Government_Cantonese_Romanisation
-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_romanization_of_Cantonese
but most schemes are quite similar it seems.
6 tones, though average speakers themselves can’t tell the tone of each character because it is not taught in school: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cantonese-tones-explained-nicholas-angiers/.
They actually have two different rising and three different level tones, which is completely insane, how can you differentiate that??
Some people count 9 due to syllables that end in p, t or k and which can only have 3 of the previous 6, but better just group those three with the corresponding of the other 6.
No "turn around the middle" tones though. So a common notation is start point to end point:
-
55 high level
-
35 mid rising
-
33 mid level
-
21 low falling
-
22 low level
-
23 low rising
There was also a high falling 52/53 but it merged with 55 in Hong Kong, so it is not normally noted anymore.