The Macau Government Cantonese Romanization ( pt, Romanização Cantonesa do Governo de Macau; zh, 澳門政府粵語拼音) refers to the mostly consistent system for
romanizing
Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...
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 a ...
as employed by the
Government of Macau
The Government of the Macau Special Administrative Region (; Portuguese: Governo da R.A.E. de Macau; conventional short name Macau Government, 澳門政府, Governo de Macau), are headed by secretariats or commissioners and report directly t ...
and other non-governmental organizations based in
Macau
Macau or Macao (; ; ; ), officially the Macao Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (MSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China in the western Pearl River Delta by the South China Sea. With a pop ...
. The system has been employed by the Macau Government since the
Portuguese colonial period and continues to be used after the 1999
handover of the territory. Similarly to its
counterpart romanization system in Hong Kong, the method is not completely standardized and thus is not taught in schools, but rather employed by government agencies to accurately display the correct pronunciation of Cantonese in public signage and official usage.
The Macau Government romanization of Cantonese uses a similar convention to that of the Hong Kong Government's but is based on
Portuguese
Portuguese may refer to:
* anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal
** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods
** Portuguese language, a Romance language
*** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language
** Portu ...
pronunciation rather than
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
, given the colonial history of Macau. Therefore, the two governmental standards have differing orthographies for the same Cantonese pronunciation; for instance, the place name known as 石排灣 in Chinese is romanized as
Seac Pai Van
Seac Pai Van, Siac Pai Van (literally: Seac Pai Bay) is a former bay that separated Taipa and Coloane of Macau, China. Seac Pai Bay has been reclaimed from the sea as part of Cotai.
See also
* Praia Grande Bay
* Hac Sa Beach
Hac Sa Beach ( ...
in Macau but as
Shek Pai Wan
Shek Pai Wan or Aberdeen Bay is a bay between Aberdeen on Hong Kong Island and Ap Lei Chau (formerly Aberdeen Island). Its name was formerly romanized as Shekpywan. The bay is one of the traditional fishery ports because the hills on two sides ...
in Hong Kong.
Usage
For most of Macau's colonial history, the Portuguese government lacked a consistent way of romanizing Cantonese into Portuguese but adopted a de facto standard for transliterating proper names such as geographical locations and surnames. The 1985 publication of the ''Silabário Codificado de Romanização do Cantonense'' created a phonetic table and tonal chart of Cantonese based on Portuguese phonology and afterwards became the basis for Cantonese to Portuguese romanization. Prior to this adoption, individuals who studied or conducted business frequently in nearby
British Hong Kong
Hong Kong was a colony and later a dependent territory of the British Empire from 1841 to 1997, apart from a period of occupation under the Japanese Empire from 1941 to 1945 during the Pacific War. The colonial period began with the British ...
would have a tendency to adopt an English-based Hong Kong transliteration for romanizing Cantonese.
Orthography
While the system is not officially standardized, the Macau Government romanization system more or less follows consistent patterns and uses the
Portuguese alphabet
Portuguese orthography is based on the Latin alphabet and makes use of the acute accent, the circumflex accent, the grave accent, the tilde, and the cedilla to denote stress, vowel height, nasalization, and other sound changes. The diaeresis wa ...
as its basis. This results in the substitution of letters found in other Cantonese romanization methods for their closest Portuguese equivalents, such as the letter 'v' for 'w' (/w/). As with the system used by the Hong Kong Government, all tones and distinctions between long and short vowels are omitted.
[Cheng, Siu-Pong and Tang, Sze-Wing. ''The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language'': Cantonese Romanization (London: Routledge, 2016), p.49.]
Consanants
Initials
Finals
Note: *Denotes non-governmental standard but may be used as an alternative
Vowels, diphthongs, and syllabic consonants
References
External links
Portaria no. 1 081-A, of 30 March 1933, regarding a Portuguese romanization method for Chinese characters, published in the Official Gazette of Macau, no. 17 of 1933, pages 408–411 via archives.gov.mo
Decree-Law no. 88/85/M, approving the Cantonese romanization codified syllabary, as published in the Official Gazette of Macau, no. 40/1985 via bo.io.gov.mo
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Languages of Macau
Cantonese romanisation