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I recently attended a Cantonese reading class in Hong Kong and discovered that pronunciation of the spoken form of written Cantonese can be very different from normal speech.
The teacher was not able to provide an reasonable explanation as why this is the case and whether this is unique to Hong Kong.
Can anyone here provide some insight to this?
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 Chinese -- the characters will sound very different to Mandarin, but the reader would still be speaking out a Mandarin text. Hence the 給 vs 俾 example: 給 is Standard Chinese, 俾 is Cantonese.
Cantonese can be (and is) written, with all the "right" characters (係, 唔, 俾, etc) and grammar. You can see many examples of this in ads, in trains and buses for example, especially from the government and local companies, when they want to "talk" to the public.
As for Guangdong people not knowing that 給 is kap1 that's not the case -- there are plenty of words used in Cantonese that have the word 給 is it, including more recent creations like the net slang expression "給力".
The spoken form of Cantonese is not unique to Hong Kong. Cantonese is used in many countries and cities, for example, Macau and ShenZhen.
給 is used only when you write. 俾 is used when you speak. If you use 給 as "give" when you speak, you will be weird because no one do that.
In Cantonese-speaking regions, we also have a lot of different words:
Oh one more thing. You cannot actually write out Cantonese. It is just using the words that have the same pronunciation as what we say. When we encounter some words that we can't write out, we use latin letters.
亻尔真系吾可厶人手丁廣東言舌出嚟。 You can write things in Cantonese, but there is no standard way of writing it.
Jun 19, 2012 at 4:22
Just to synthesize the two previous answers here, here's a summary: written Chinese is the written form of Mandarin. Cantonese speakers read and write the same Chinese as Mandarin speakers, but pronounce most of the characters differently. Cantonese itself is (traditionally) only a spoken dialect. Written forms of Cantonese do exist, however, and are used in Hong Kong and elsewhere, but their use is much less frequent than written Chinese and is considered to be very informal.
I don't agree with Derek saying "you cannot write out cantonese"...There is written form of cantonese and you can see it everyday on HK newspapers, eg they don't write 不是 but they will write 唔係, and maybe native cantonese speakers never really think that written form is a "big thing", but I have noticed that foreigners trying to learn this language all want to know the written characters too, how to write, what they mean and how to pronounce. This is quite important too, if you want to read a magazine or newspaper in HK, you won't go anywhere if you don't know those cantonese characters.
唔係 in newspapers. (actually they will use 否) We don't write out 口語. We use 書面語 in writings.
Jun 19, 2012 at 4:17
I think by 'written Cantonese', you are probably referring to 'written Chinese'. Cantonese is a form of Chinese used mostly in southern China and its decedents, apart from Mandarin which has become an official spoken language in China in the mid 20 Century.
Cantonese shares a lot of words and vocabularies with Mandarin but has also a lot of words unique from Mandarin partially due to its long history (of over 2000 years). "Give / To give" is 給 as written in modern Chinese, but should be 俾 as written in Cantonese, because 給 is pronounced as kup7 (7th tone, a short-version of 1st tone, in the Cantonese 9-tones system), while 俾 is pronounced as bei2 (2nd tone). No one will use 給 in a normal Cantonese conversation.
By the way, less than a hundred years ago, Chinese was still written mostly written in the classical/old Chinese form (without the boundary of the dialects but definitely add another level of difficulty to learn), unlike today which is written mostly according to the 'official spoken' Chinese. This movement of writing Chinese (more or less) in a form how Chinese is spoken began only in the 1910s. http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%96%B0%E6%96%87%E5%AD%B8%E9%81%8B%E5%8B%95
For spoken Cantonese, it's different from written Cantonese.
e.g. 唔係(m4 hai6)-->不是(bat1 si6)
It's different, right?
There's a really good website that highlights the difference (in characters between dialect and Mandarin): http://phonemica.net/ You can listen to a speech and read the verbatim Cantonese and equivalent meaning (a translation of sorts) in Mandarin subscript.
Some characters are unique to Cantonese that are more oral fillers. Some are Cantonese slang that have a Mandarin equivalent. This website has a great comparison and Canto Pinyin too! http://phonemica.net/entry?mid=543746312bd553930782aac7&story=0 It's also a wonderful linguistic map of China that anyone can edit and upload to.
