Sidney Lau Sek-cheung (; died 1987) was a

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 ...

teacher in the Chinese Language Section of the Government Training Division and Principal of the Government Language School of the Hong Kong Government. He had graduated bachelor of arts from

Sun Yat-sen University Sun Yat-sen University (, abbreviated SYSU and colloquially known in Chinese as Zhongda), also known as Zhongshan University, is a national key public research university located in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. It was founded in 1924 by and nam ...

, Guangdong, People's Republic of China.

Texts

Lau wrote a series of textbooks in the 1960s and 1970s, for teaching Anglophones to speak

. The textbooks were initially used for teaching western expatriates working in the

Hong Kong Police Force The Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) is the primary law enforcement, investigative agency, and largest disciplined service under the Security Bureau of Hong Kong. The Royal Hong Kong Police Force (RHKPF) reverted to its former name after the t ...

and other

government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government i ...

bodies. Later the texts were used as a basis for a radio teaching programme for foreigners. Lau's books introduced his own romanisation system which differs from the widely used Yale system and the nine other identified predecessors by using superscripted numbers to indicate the tones of the words, a method copied 16 years later by the creators of the little used but academically favoured

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 fo ...

. The third system in general use in Hong Kong after Lau and Yale is the Hong Kong Government or "Standard Romanisation" system developed by James D Ball and Ernst J Eitel, and upon which Lau's was largely based. Lau's ''A Practical Cantonese-English Dictionary'', with 22,000 Cantonese entries, was published by the Hong Kong government in 1977, and reviewed favorably by Dew in the ''Journal of Chinese Linguistics''.

Current use

Despite five decades since publication, the books remain popular, being among the few comprehensive courses teaching spoken Cantonese (as opposed to

written Chinese Written Chinese () comprises Chinese characters used to represent the Chinese language. Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally r ...

and spoken Mandarin, which are significantly different).

References

External links

Explanation of Sidney Lau's Cantonese Romanization System
Year of birth missing 1987 deaths Hong Kong educators Linguists from China Sun Yat-sen University alumni Cantonese language {{HongKong-writer-stub

Texts

Current use

See also

References

External links