On Fri, 10 May 2002, Marco Cimarosti wrote:

> Where could I find a comparation of the different romanization system used
> for Cantonese?
> I am especially interested in a cross-reference table beween Yale and
> Jyutping.

I have a chart I made months ago of a number of systems, but it didn't
include Jyutping (U+7CB5 U+62FC). However, Yale and Jyutping are pretty
similar:

Yale Jyutping
--------------
j- z-
ch- c-
y- j-
-eu -oe
-eun -eon
-eut -eot
-a -aa
-eui -eoi

It apparently looks less "English" (Yale <j->, <ch->, <y->) and more
"IPA"-like (Jyutping <j->, <-oe>) than Yale, along with some
regularizations (Yale uses <-a> in open syllables but <-aa-> in closed
syllables for the same "long (vowel length) a" vowel; cf., Jyutping's
consistent representation).

Instead of Yale's combination of <-h-> and diacritics to indicate tone, a
full-sized number is suffixed to the syllable, e.g., 'horse' is <maa5>,
rather than Yale's <mah> with an acute over the <a>.

Yale Jyutping
---------------- ---------
macron or grave 1
acute 2
no diacritic 3
grave + <-h-> 4
acute + <-h-> 5
no diac. + <-h-> 6

If you already use a variant of Yale that uses numerals, then Jyutping
tone marking is virtually identical.

I don't know if Jyutping has a way of marking base and changed tones due
to sandhi (nor how Yale does it, for that matter)--I presume something
along the lines of listing the base tone followed by a hyphen and the
changed tone would be used, e.g., *<tong4> 'sugar' vs. *<tong4-2> 'candy'.


What other systems are you interested in? There are minor complications
with some older systems which depict an older phonology and/or a different
but neighboring dialect (i.e., Yue Chinese, but not Std. Cantonese).


Thomas Chan
tc31@...