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ILE romanization of Cantonese

The Institute of Language in Education Scheme () also known as the List of Cantonese Pronunciation of Commonly-used Chinese Characters romanization scheme (), ILE scheme, and Cantonese Pinyin, is a romanization system for Cantonese developed by Ping-Chiu Thomas Yu () in 1971, and subsequently modified by the Education Department of Hong Kong (now the Education Bureau) and Zhan Bohui (詹伯慧) of the Chinese Dialects Research Centre of the Jinan University, Guangdong, PRC, and honorary professor of the School of Chinese, University of Hong Kong. It is the only romanization system accepted by Education and Manpower Bureau of Hong Kong and Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority.

The Institute of Education in its name refers to the Institute of Language in Education (), which later became part of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, now the Education University of Hong Kong.

Pinyin

The ILE system directly corresponds to the S. L. Wong system, an IPA-based phonemic transcription system used in A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton by Wong Shik Ling. Generally, if an IPA symbol is also a basic Latin letter, the same symbol is used directly in the romanization (with the exception of the IPA symbol "a"); and if the IPA symbol is not a basic Latin letter, it is romanized using basic Latin letters. Thus, →aa, →a, →e, →o, →oe, →ng. This results in a system which is both easy to learn and type but is still useful for academics.

In the following table (based on Zhan's variant), the first row inside a cell shows the ILE, the second row shows a representative "narrow transcription" in IPA, while the third row shows the corresponding IPA "broad transcription" using the S. L. Wong system.

Initials

Finals

  • The finals m and ng can only be used as standalone nasal syllables.

Tones

The system recognises nine tones in six distinct tone contours.

Comparison with Yale romanization

ILE and the Yale romanization system represent Cantonese pronunciations with these same letters:

  • The initials: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw, w.
  • The vowels: aa (except when used alone), a, e, i, o, u.
  • The nasal stops: m, ng.
  • The codas: i (except for being the coda in Yale), u, m, n, ng, p, t, k.

But they have these differences:

  • The vowels oe represent and in ILE while the eu represents both vowels in Yale.
  • The vowel y represents in ILE while both yu (used in nucleus) and i (used in coda) are used in Yale.
  • The initial j represents in ILE while y is used instead in Yale.
  • The initial dz represents in ILE while j is used instead in Yale.
  • The initial ts represents in ILE while ch is used instead in Yale.
  • In ILE, if no consonant precedes the vowel y, then the initial j is appended before the vowel. In Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances.
  • Some new finals can be written in ILE that are not contained in Yale romanization schemes, such as: eu , em , and ep . These three finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6 (掉), lem2 (舐), and gep9 (夾).
  • To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in ILE while Yale originally used tone marks together with the letter h (though tone numbers can be used in Yale as well).

Comparison with Jyutping

ILE and Jyutping represent Cantonese pronunciations with these same letters:

  • The initials: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw, j, w.
  • The vowels: aa, a, e, i, o, u.
  • The nasal stops: m, ng.
  • The codas: i (except for being the coda in Jyutping), u, m, n, ng, p, t, k.

But they have these differences:

  • The vowels oe represent and in ILE while eo and oe represent and respectively in Jyutping.
  • The vowel y represents in ILE while both yu (used in nucleus) and i (used in coda) are used in Jyutping.
  • The initial dz represents in ILE while z is used instead in Jyutping.
  • The initial ts represents in ILE while c is used instead in Jyutping.
  • To represent tones, numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in ILE, although to use 1, 3, 6 to replace 7, 8, 9 is acceptable. However, only numbers 1 to 6 are used in Jyutping.

Examples

Sample transcription of one of the 300 Tang Poems by Meng Haoran:

References

Further reading

External links