Hot answers tagged cantonese
8
The analogy to Portuguese and Spanish is a good one. Just don't forget that the writing system is a bit like Latin. In the middle ages nobody spoke Latin but many people could read and write it. Written Chinese was the equivalent to written Latin. Now, people write in Modern Standard Mandarin, which is the same as the spoken language taught in the schools. ...
8
The pronunciation of the two are totally different. Hong Kong people humorously call it "the chicken talking to the duck" as they cannot understand each other.
The two are both tonal languages (different tones has different meanings for the same sound) and they also have different vowels and consonants, too.
Cantonese preserves some older grammatical ...
8
Normally we use the verb "点"
你点啊？
leih dim a?
English: What's up? (less formal)
你点样啊？
leih dim yeung a?
English: How are you doing? (more formal)
你近排点啊？
leih gan pai dim a?
English: How have you been doing?
你呢排点啊？
leih li pai dim a?
English: How've you been lately?
8
For the most part both dialects use the same words and phrases (primarily with differences in slang terms). While some phrases are used more frequently in one dialect than another to express the same idea, the meanings are preserved across dialects (they don't mean different things, just people who use one dialect may prefer one saying to another).
In ...
7
As your linked table indicates, the Middle Chinese 陰上 tone generally corresponds to Cantonese tone 2 and Mandarin tone 3, so it is indeed curious that you see both words having tone 4 in Mandarin, which typically corresponds to Middle Chinese 去 tones or 陽上 tones where the syllable onset is an obstruent (全濁聲母).
Looking up the characters in the Kangxi ...
6
You're right, most foreign words are transliterated differently in Mandarin and in Cantonese. Sometimes there are even different standards in different Mandarin speaking regions. It's an interesting idea to use characters that have similar pronunciations in both dialects to unify the transliteration but it's not what has already happened.
A few examples of ...
6
It should be read in the original lau4 (陽平) tone, but not only because it's "classical", but primarily because the poem follows the tone pattern of a five-syllable regulated verse (五絕).
Tones in Middle Chinese were classified into 平 (level), 上 (rising), 去 (departing), and 入 (entering), the latter three of which were classified as 仄 (oblique) for the ...
5
Lao is a member of the Tai–Kadai language family. This family does include some languages spoken by minority groups, including the Zhuang languages of Guangxi. Several languages in this group have words which sound familiar to Cantonese speakers. (I remember traveling to Thailand and being shocked by how similar Thai numerals are to those of Cantonese.) ...
5
If you happen to be familiar with Mandarin or Standard Written Chinese, the Cantonese character 咁 (gam3) corresponds to 這麼 or 那麼 and 噉 (gam2) corresponds to 這樣 or 那樣. As jogloran mentioned, 咁 is a prefix modifier whereas 噉 is postfix or a standalone pronoun.
You'll often see 咁 written where gam2 is intended, which is likely the reason why 咁 appears in your ...
5
咁 (gam3) and 噉 (gam2) have very similar meanings: 'to this extent', 'so', 'such'.
However, 咁 (gam3) pre-modifies adjectives, and 噉 (gam2) post-modifies verbs. 噉 (gam2) or 噉樣 (gam2joeng6*2) also occurs as a pronoun meaning 'like this/that'.
I think the occurrence of 咁 in the first sentence should probably be written as 噉 (gam2) as well... after all, 敢 has ...
5
Both 做番 and 做返 are used to represent the Cantonese expression, jouh fāan.
There is a reason why some people choose to write 番 and others write 返. Etymologically speaking, 返 is the correct character to use. However, because the traditional literary pronunciation of 返 is fáan (2nd tone) instead of fāan (1st tone), some people will write 番 instead to make it ...
5
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe all Cantonese characters (theoretically) have pinyin representations. Examples:
冇 (have not) / Yale: mou5 / Pinyin: mao3
佢哋 (they) / Yale: keui5 dei6 / Pinyin: qu2 di4
咗 (similar to 了) / Yale: jo2 / Pinyin: zuo3
嘢 (thing) / Yale: ye5 / Pinyin: ye3
But in my experience, using a Standard Chinese Pinyin IME to enter ...
4
I speak both and find most of the commentary here to be overly generalized or incorrect.
First, analogies in Indo-European languages: There are none. As to how far apart the oral languages are, think of French and Italian, which share more syntax than most Romance language pairs, but with very different phonetic structure.
Second, which is easier. A ...
4
I think the difference between Cantonese and Mandarin is more like the difference between English and Swedish. They are obviously very closely related and share a lot of vocabulary, but intelligibility is pretty much zero. The poster who compared the difference to American and British English is TOTALLY wrong. Many Mandarin speakers will claim that they can ...
4
The preferred phonetic input method (like pinyin) for Cantonese is Jyutping (粤拼/jyut6ping3/yue4pin1 in Mandarin).
In GNU/Linux, both SCIM and (the now preferred?) IBus have packages available that add Jyutping support.
They are available for Debian, but might be hard to find for other systems. At least I have only found .deb and .rpm for ibus-jyutping, ...
4
If you don't want to install a Cantonese IME, the Cantonese specific characters are included in cangjie (倉頡), using the same stroke decomposing rules. Here are some examples:
冇 = 大月
哋 = 口土心木
睇 = 月山金弓竹
Another useful resource is http://www.cantoneseinput.com/
4
This is not only in Cantonese. People in several south provinces say these words. And most Chinese are familiar with 廿 (niàn or pán) and 卅, even though they don't usually say it.
卅 (sà) means 30
卌 (xì) means 40
皕 (bì) means 200
4
咩 (me1) as a sentence final particle is used not only to mark the sentence as a question, but also to indicate surprise (or disbelief) that the situation is not what you expected. Taking your example:
唔使返工咩？ (m4 sai2 faan1 gung1 me1?) "You don't need to go to work?"
This asks why the receiver doesn't need to go to work, but also indicates that you ...
3
Of course it exists in Mandarin. I didn't know it is a Cantonese expression. Maybe it should be just "Chinese expression".
I cannot answer whether the meaning are the same. I don't know Cantonese. But I think the meaning should be the same in Cantonese and Mandarin.
"五福" comes form 《尚书·洪范》:
五福：一曰寿，二曰富，三曰康宁，四曰攸(yōu)好(hào)德，五曰考终命。
which are long life, ...
3
If you're looking for specific characteristics of particular accents, there are a couple I have noticed that have been fairly reliable.
I'm usually able to tell whether someone is from Shanghai (or a nearby Wu-dialect area) based on the way they pronounce the word 能 (néng). Instead of the standard [nəŋ], they often say [nəɲ]. Note the [ɲ] (a palatal nasal ...
3
This will give you a good background into each of the systems:
Cantonese romanization systems are based on the accent of Canton and
Hong Kong, and have helped define the concept of Standard Cantonese.
The major systems are Barnett–Chao, Meyer–Wempe, the Chinese
government's Guangdong Romanization, Yale and Jyutping. While they do
not differ ...
3
While officially there is only one Chinese written language, there are many spoken dialects. This written language is referred to as 白话 (báihuà) and is used across China. The spoken languages (i.e. dialects) can differ significantly from 白话 - both in vocabulary and in grammar. Thus, spoken Cantonese differs substantially from 白话. It is key here to realize ...
3
halfelf's answer is correct, but I'll say a little more about how they're used in Cantonese, since the behaviour of these abbreviations is a little unusual there.
廿 jaa6 indeed abbreviates 二十 ji6 sap6. Similarly, 卅 abbreviates 三十 saam1 sap6. But 卅 is pronounced saa1aa6, an unusual tone contour.
Abbreviations for numbers 40 and above are formed regularly: ...
3
I am a Chinese who happens to know the basics of Cantonese and grew up listening to some Cantonese pop songs.
Is there any famous traditional Chinese poet who lived in Guangdong and/or is known to or can be assumed to have written poetry for Cantonese?
No I do not think there is any famous traditional Chinese poet who did that. There is an author 黄霑 ...
2
A good European analogy is
Cantonese : Mandarin :: Swiss German : German
Consider the following characteristics of Cantonese and Swiss German:
Both are minority tongues that could be considered languages in their own right by linguists, but are popularly thought of as dialects for political and orthographic reasons.
Speakers of Cantonese and Swiss ...
2
Hm, this is all very interesting. I have no knowledge of Cantonese, but the general impression I gleaned from Wikipedia is that Cantonese speaking regions operate under a form of diglossia wherein they use Cantonese and related dialects in speech but standard Chinese in writing. Traditional characters vs. simplified make no difference - that's a matter of ...
2
I think the best analogy is between Spanish and French - mutually unintelligible, but the characters are largely the same, and a reader of Spanish could quickly acclimate to understanding written French, though would need to study before speaking with any fluency.
Cantonese is often referred to as a dialect of Chinese, though, in my opinion, that's mostly ...
2
The two most common systems are Yale and Jyutping, the latter was invented as late as 1993. I think both are included alongside pinyin in Unicode's a perhaps other Chinese lookup tables.
My own experience is that hardly any native speakers are even aware of these systems, especially in mainland China where they don't learn their own language at school at ...
2
Your title should rather be "Cantonese Pronunciation of Written (Standard) Chinese". What you are talking about is not really Cantonese, rather it's (mostly) Mandarin, that, if you read out loud, will be pronounced with the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters. It's more or less the same as asking a Korean or Japanese to read out a text written in ...
2
The fourth tone is usually considered low-falling, rather than low-flat.
The fourth tone begins just a little lower than where the sixth tone begins. Just start by producing the sixth tone, and then bring the pitch down as low as you can.
In terms of tone numbers (a 1-5 scale, with 1 the lowest), fourth tone is usually transcribed as 21, third tone as 33, ...
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