Jyutping

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Jyutping (Chinese: ??; Jyutping: Jyut6ping3; Cantonese pronunciation: [j?:t?.p???]) is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK), an academic group, in 1993. Its formal name is The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanisation Scheme. The LSHK promotes the use of this romanisation system.

The name Jyutping (itself the Jyutping romanisation of its Chinese name, ??) is a contraction consisting of the first Chinese characters of the terms Jyut6jyu5 (??, meaning "Cantonese speech") and ping3jam1 (?? "phonetic alphabet").

Video Jyutping

History

The Jyutping system marks a departure from all previous Cantonese romanisation systems (approximately, 12 including Robert Morrison's pioneering work of 1828, and the widely used Standard Romanization, Yale and Sidney Lau systems) by introducing z and c initials and the use of eo and oe in finals, as well as replacing the initial y, used in all previous systems, with j.

Maps Jyutping

Initials

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Finals

• Only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables.
• ^ ^ ^ Referring to the colloquial pronunciation of these words.

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Tones

There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese. However, as three of the nine are entering tones (??, Jyutping: jap6sing1), which only appear in syllables ending with p, t, and k, they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping (though they do in Cantonese Pinyin; these are shown in parentheses in the table below).

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Comparison with Yale romanisation

Jyutping and the Yale Romanisation of Cantonese represent Cantonese pronunciations with the same letters in:

• The initials: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw, w.
• The vowel: aa (except when used alone), a, e, i, o, u, yu.
• The nasal stop: m, ng.
• The coda: i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k.

But they differ in the following:

• The vowels eo and oe represent /?/ and /oe:/ respectively in Jyutping, whereas the eu represents both vowels in Yale.
• The initial j represents /j/ in Jyutping whereas y is used instead in Yale.
• The initial z represents /ts/ in Jyutping whereas j is used instead in Yale.
• The initial c represents /ts?/ in Jyutping whereas ch is used instead in Yale.
• In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel yu, then the initial j is appended before the vowel. In Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances.
• Jyutping defines three finals not in Yale: eu /?:u/, em /?:m/, and ep /?:p/. These three finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6 (?), lem2 (?), and gep6 (?).
• To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping whereas Yale traditionally uses tone marks together with the letter h (though tone numbers can be used in Yale as well).

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Comparison with Cantonese pinyin

Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin represent Cantonese pronunciations with the same letters in:

• The initials: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw, j, w.
• The vowel: aa, a, e, i, o, u.
• The nasal stop: m, ng.
• The coda: i (except for its use in the coda /y/ in Jyutping; see below), u, m, n, ng, p, t, k.

But they have some differences:

• The vowel oe represents both /?/ and /oe:/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas eo and oe represent /?/ and /oe:/ respectively in Jyutping.
• The vowel y represents /y/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas both yu (used in the nucleus) and i (used in the coda of the final -eoi) are used in Jyutping.
• The initial dz represents /ts/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas z is used instead in Jyutping.
• The initial ts represents /ts?/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas c is used instead in Jyutping.
• To represent tones, the numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in Cantonese Pinyin, although the use of 1, 3, 6 to replace 7, 8, 9 for the checked tones is acceptable. However, only the numbers 1 to 6 are used in Jyutping.

Examples

Sample transcription of one of the 300 Tang Poems:

Jyutping input method

The Jyutping method (Chinese: ?????) refers to a family of input methods based on the Jyutping romanization system.

The Jyutping method allows a user to input Chinese characters by entering the jyutping of a Chinese character (with or without tone, depending on the system) and then presenting the user with a list of possible characters with that pronunciation.

List of Jyutping keyboard input utilities

• Online Jyutping Input Method (???????)
• MDBG Type Chinese
• Red Dragonfly (????????????)
• LSHK Jyutping for Macintosh Mac OS X and OS 9 (The page also includes Yale input version 0.2)
• Hong Kong Cantonese 2010 (via Microsoft Office IME 2010)
• Canton Easy Input (???????)
• Cantonese Phonetic IME (????????) (also called 'Cantonese Phonetic IME (CPIME) Jyutping' in Windows 10)

See also

• Cantonese phonology

Footnotes

External links

• Jyutping Pronunciation Guide
• ????: Learning the phonetic system of Cantonese
• Chinese Character Database (Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect)
• The CantoDict Project is a dedicated Cantonese-Mandarin-English online dictionary which uses Jyutping by default
• MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary (supports both Jyutping and Yale romanization)

Source of the article : Wikipedia