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Jyutping

The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme, also known as Jyutping, is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed in 1993 by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK).

The name Jyutping (itself the Jyutping romanisation of its Chinese name, ) is a contraction of the official name, and it consists of the first Chinese characters of the terms jyut6 jyu5 () and ping3 jam1 (; pronounced pīnyīn in Mandarin).

Despite being intended as a system to indicate pronunciation, it has also been employed in —in effect, elevating Jyutping from its assistive status to a written language.

History

The Jyutping system departs from all previous Cantonese romanisation systems (approximately 12, including Robert Morrison's pioneering work of 1828, and the widely used Standard Romanization, Yale and Sidney Lau systems) by introducing z and c initials and the use of eo and oe in finals, as well as replacing the initial y, used in all previous systems, with j.

In 2018, it was updated to include the -a and -oet finals, to reflect syllables recognized as part of Cantonese phonology in 1997 by the Jyutping Work Group of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

Initials

Finals

  • Only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables.
  • Used for elided words in casual speech such as a6 in 四十四 (sei3 a6 sei3), elided from sei3 sap6 sei3.
  • Referring to the colloquial pronunciation of these words.
  • Used for onomatopoeias such as oet6 for belching or goet4 for snoring.

Tones

There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese. However, as three of the nine are entering tones (), which only appear in syllables ending with p, t, and k, they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping (though they do in the ILE romanization of Cantonese; these are shown in parentheses in the table below). A mnemonic which some use to remember this is or "Feng Shui [dictates that] we will be lucky."

Comparison with Yale romanisation

Jyutping and the Yale romanisation of Cantonese represent Cantonese pronunciations with the same letters in:

  • The initials: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw, w.
  • The vowel: aa (except when used alone), a, e, i, o, u, yu.
  • The nasal stop: m, ng.
  • The coda: i, u, m, n, ng, p, t, k.

But they differ in the following:

  • The vowels eo and oe represent and respectively in Jyutping, whereas the eu represents both vowels in Yale.
  • The initial j represents in Jyutping whereas y is used instead in Yale.
  • The initial z represents in Jyutping whereas j is used instead in Yale.
  • The initial c represents in Jyutping whereas ch is used instead in Yale.
  • In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel yu, then the initial j is appended before the vowel. In Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances.
  • Jyutping defines five finals not in Yale: a , eu , em , ep , oet . These finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6 (), lem2 (), and gep6 ().
  • To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping whereas Yale traditionally uses tone marks together with the letter h (though tone numbers can be used in Yale as well).

Comparison with ILE romanisation

Jyutping and ILE romanisation represent Cantonese pronunciations with the same letters in:

  • The initials: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw, j, w.
  • The vowel: aa, a, e, i, o, u.
  • The nasal stop: m, ng.
  • The coda: i (except for its use in the coda in Jyutping; see below), u, m, n, ng, p, t, k.

But they have some differences:

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

Examples

Sample transcription of one of the 300 Tang Poems:

Jyutping input method

A Jyutping input method allows a user to type Chinese characters by entering their Jyutping romanization (with or without tone, depending on the system) and then presenting the user with a list of possible characters with that pronunciation.

As of macOS Ventura and iOS 16, Jyutping input in traditional Chinese characters is a built-in functionality on Mac under the name "Phonetic – Cantonese" and on iPhone and iPad under the name "Cantonese".

List of Jyutping keyboard input utilities

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

External links