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Barnett–Chao Romanisation
The Cantonese Romanisation system known as Barnett–Chao (abbreviated here as B–C) is based on the principles of the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system (GR) developed by Chao Yuenren in the 1920s, which he modified in 1947. The B-C system is a modification in 1950 by K M A Barnett (an Administrative Officer of the Hong Kong Government) which was adopted by the School of Oriental and African Studies, London (SOAS). Barnett-Chao was used in the Chinese Language Training Section (formerly the Government Language School) of the Government Training Division of the Hong Kong Government from 1963 to 1967 but its transcription was considered "over-complicated" for teaching Cantonese as a second language and abandoned in favour of Sidney Lau's version of Standard Romanisation. After appearing in only a handful of texts, it fell into disuse. Description Like GR spelling, B–C spelling uses contrasting unvoiced/voiced pairs of consonants to represent aspirated and unaspirated sounds. B–C al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding area in Southeastern China. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese dialect group, which has over 80 million native speakers. While the term ''Cantonese'' specifically refers to the prestige variety, it is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but largely mutually unintelligible languages and dialects such as Taishanese. Cantonese is viewed as a vital and inseparable part of the cultural identity for its native speakers across large swaths of Southeastern China, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in overseas communities. In mainland China, it is the ''lingua franca'' of the province of Guangdong (being the majority language of the Pearl River Delta) and neighbouring areas such as Guang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gwoyeu Romatzyh
Gwoyeu Romatzyh (), abbreviated GR, is a system for writing Mandarin Chinese in the Latin alphabet. The system was conceived by Yuen Ren Chao and developed by a group of linguists including Chao and Lin Yutang from 1925 to 1926. Chao himself later published influential works in linguistics using GR. In addition a small number of other textbooks and dictionaries in GR were published in Hong Kong and overseas from 1942 to 2000. GR is the better known of the two romanization systems which indicate the four tones of Mandarin by varying the spelling of syllables ("tonal spelling"). These tones are fundamental to the Chinese language; their presence lets speakers discriminate between otherwise identical syllables and words. Other systems indicate the tones with either diacritics (for example Pinyin: ''āi, ái, ǎi'' and ''ài'') or numbers (Wade–Giles: ''ai1, ai2'', etc.). GR spells the four tones of the same vowel, ''ai'', ''air'', ''ae'' and ''ay''. These spellings, which follow ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yuen Ren Chao
Yuen Ren Chao (; 3 November 1892 – 25 February 1982), also known as Zhao Yuanren, was a Chinese-American linguist, educator, scholar, poet, and composer, who contributed to the modern study of Chinese phonology and grammar. Chao was born and raised in China, then attended university in the United States, where he earned degrees from Cornell University and Harvard University. A naturally gifted polyglot and linguist, his ''Mandarin Primer'' was one of the most widely used Mandarin Chinese textbooks in the 20th century. He invented the Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanization scheme, which, unlike pinyin and other romanization systems, transcribes Mandarin Chinese pronunciation without diacritics or numbers to indicate tones. Early life Chao was born in Tianjin in 1892, though his family's ancestral home was in Changzhou, Jiangsu province. In 1910, Chao went to the United States with a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study mathematics and physics at Cornell University, where he was a cla ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SOAS, University Of London
SOAS University of London (; the School of Oriental and African Studies) is a public research university in London, England, and a member institution of the federal University of London. Founded in 1916, SOAS is located in the Bloomsbury area of central London. SOAS is one of the world's leading institutions for the study of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Its library is one of the five national research libraries in the UK. SOAS also houses the Brunei Gallery, which hosts a programme of changing contemporary and historical exhibitions from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East with the aim of presenting and promoting cultures from these regions. SOAS is divided into three faculties: Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Faculty of Languages and Cultures, and Faculty of Law and Social Sciences. It is home to the SOAS School of Law, which is one of the leading law schools in the UK. The university offers around 350 bachelor's degree combinations, more than 100 one-year master's degr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sidney Lau Romanisation
Sidney Lau romanisation is a system of romanisation for Cantonese that was developed in the 1970s by Sidney Lau for teaching Cantonese to Hong Kong Government expatriates. It is based on the Hong Kong Government's Standard Romanisation which was the result of the work of James D. Ball and Ernst J. Eitel about a century earlier. Innovation Lau's singular creative step was to indicate tonality with superscript numbers so as to do away with diacritics entirely. His system was a plain attempt at simplification which proved popular with western learners of Cantonese as a second language and was initially the system of romanisation adopted by the University of Hong Kong. However, the university now employs the Jyutping Jyutping 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 Romanization Scheme. The LSHK advocates for ... system for its ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Standard Romanization (Cantonese)
Standard Romanization is a romanization system for Standard Cantonese, Cantonese developed by Christian missionaries in South China in 1888, particularly relying upon the work of John Chalmers (missionary), John Morrison Chalmers. By 1914, it had become well established in Canton and Hong Kong (there being no other system of significance in published literature) and publications using it having been issued by the British and Foreign Bible Society, the China Baptist Publication Society,for example, and the Pakhoi Mission Press from as early as 1906. It is the foundation of the current system of Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation, Romanisation used by the Hong Kong Government. Initials Finals * The finals ''m'' and ''ng'' can only be used as standalone nasal stop, nasal syllables. *When ''h'' or ''k'' is an initial, ''om'' and ''op'' are used as the final, instead of ''am'' and ''ap''. *When ''s'', ''ts'' or ''ts’'' is the initial, and ''i'' is the final, the final ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Syllabic Nasal
A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacritic in the International Phonetic Alphabet is used, . It may be instead represented by an overstroke, if the symbol that it modifies has a descender, such as in . Syllabic consonants in most languages are sonorants, such as nasals and liquids. Very few have syllabic obstruents, such as stops and fricatives in normal words, but English has syllabic fricatives in paralinguistic words like ''shh!'' and ''zzz''. Examples Germanic languages In many varieties of High and Low German, pronouncing syllabic consonants may be considered a shibboleth. In High German and Tweants (a Low Saxon dialect spoken in the Netherlands; more Low Saxon dialects have the syllabic consonant), all word-final syllables in infinite verbs and feminine plural nouns s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tone Contour
A tone contour, or contour tone, is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, Khoisan languages, Oto-Manguean languages and some languages of South America. Contours When the pitch descends, the contour is called a ''falling tone;'' when it ascends, a ''rising tone;'' when it descends and then returns, a ''dipping'' or ''falling-rising tone;'' and when it ascends and then returns, it is called a ''peaking'' or ''rising-falling tone.'' A tone in a contour-tone language which remains at approximately an even pitch is called a ''level tone.'' Tones which are too short to exhibit much of a contour, typically because of a final plosive consonant, may be called '' checked, abrupt, clipped,'' or ''stopped tones.'' It has been theorized that the relative timing of a contour tone is not distinctive. That is, in some accents or ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Traditional Chinese Character
Traditional Chinese characters are one type of standard Chinese character sets of the contemporary written Chinese. The traditional characters had taken shapes since the clerical change and mostly remained in the same structure they took at the introduction of the regular script in the 2nd century. Over the following centuries, traditional characters were regarded as the standard form of printed Chinese characters or literary Chinese throughout the Sinosphere until the middle of the 20th century, before different script reforms initiated by countries using Chinese characters as a writing system. Traditional Chinese characters remain in common use in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, as well as in most overseas Chinese communities outside Southeast Asia; in addition, Hanja in Korean language remains virtually identical to traditional characters, which is still used to a certain extent in South Korea, despite differing standards used among these countries over some variant Chines ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simplified Chinese Character
Simplified Chinese characters are standardized Chinese characters used in mainland China, Malaysia and Singapore, as prescribed by the ''Table of General Standard Chinese Characters''. Along with traditional Chinese characters, they are one of the two standard character sets of the contemporary Chinese written language. The government of the People's Republic of China in mainland China has promoted them for use in printing since the 1950s and 1960s to encourage literacy. They are officially used in the People's Republic of China, Malaysia and Singapore, while traditional Chinese characters still remain in common use in Hong Kong, Macau, ROC/Taiwan and Japan to a certain extent. Simplified Chinese characters may be referred to by their official name above or colloquially . In its broadest sense, the latter term refers to all characters that have undergone simplifications of character "structure" or "body", some of which have existed for millennia mainly in handwriting alongsid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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