Re: [OT] Cantonese romanization

On Mon, 13 May 2002, John H. Jenkins wrote:

> On Monday, May 13, 2002, at 10:58 AM, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> > Thanks. Is a placename such as "Kowloon" spelled in Meyer-Wempe?
>
> No. The oldest English place-names in Hong Kong are spelled with whatever
> romanization system happened to seem appropriate to the British at the
> time. The most notorious of these is "Hong Kong" itself which makes no
> sense at all as a romanization of anything Cantonese, to the point that
> some people have speculated that it is a romanization of a different term
> from the Chinese name for the island.

I think it would still be possible, as there are places (through in the
minority) within the Pearl River Delta which pronounce the first syllable
with the same vowel as that of the second syllable. The transcription
could have originated from such an informant. Alternatively, the vowel in
the first syllable, which is represented by an oe diagraph in IPA, could
also be the result of a romanization that used umlauted o which was then
stripped of its diacritic. Yet another alternative would be that the
vowel in the first syllable, differing only in backness from that of the
second syllable, was heard as same vowel by a transcriber.


Thomas Chan
tc31@...