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Jyutping

Romanization scheme for Cantonese

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Jyutping
Jyutping Romanization
Traditional Chinese	粵拼
Simplified Chinese	粤拼
Jyutping	jyut6 ping3
Cantonese Yale	Yuhtping
Literal meaning	Yue (i.e. Cantonese) spelling
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Yuèpīn Bopomofo ㄩㄝˋ　ㄆㄧㄣ Gwoyeu Romatzyh Yuehpin Wade–Giles Yüeh4-pʻin1 Tongyong Pinyin Yuè-pin IPA [ɥê.pʰín] Yue: Cantonese Yale Romanization Yuhtping Jyutping jyut6 ping3 Canton Romanization yüd6 ping3 IPA [jyt̚˨.pʰɪŋ˧]

The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme,^{[note 1]} 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, 粵拼) is a contraction of the official name, and it consists of the first Chinese characters of the terms jyut6 jyu5 (粵語, meaning "Yue language") and ping3 jam1 (拼音 "phonetic alphabet", also pronounced as "pinyin" in Mandarin).

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

History[edit]

The Jyutping system^[1] 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.^[2]

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.^[3]

Initials[edit]

Finals[edit]

• Only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables.
• ^ Used for elided words in casual speech such as a6in四十四 (sei3 a6 sei3), elided from sei3 sap6 sei3.^[3]
• ^ ^ ^ Referring to the colloquial pronunciation of these words.
• ^ Used for onomatopoeias such as oet6 for belching or goet4 for snoring.

Tones[edit]

There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese. However, as three of the nine are entering tones (入聲; jap6 sing1), which only appear in syllables ending with p, t, and k, they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping (though they do in Cantonese Pinyin; these are shown in parentheses in the table below). A mnemonic which some use to remember this is 「風水到時我哋必發達」; fung1 seoi2 dou3 si4 ngo5 dei6 bit1 faat3 daat6 or "Feng Shui [dictates that] we will be lucky."

Comparison with Yale romanisation[edit]

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 /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping, whereas the eu represents both vowels in Yale.
• The initial j represents /j/ in Jyutping whereas y is used instead in Yale.
• The initial z represents /ts/ in Jyutping whereas j is used instead in Yale.
• The initial c represents /tsʰ/ 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 /ɐ/, eu /ɛːu/, em /ɛːm/, ep /ɛːp/, oet /œːt/. These finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6 (掉), lem2 (舐), and gep6 (夾).
• 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 Cantonese pinyin[edit]

Jyutping and Cantonese Pinyin 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 /y/ in Jyutping; see below), u, m, n, ng, p, t, k.

But they have some differences:

• The vowel oe represents both /ɵ/ and /œː/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping.
• The vowel y represents /y/ in Cantonese Pinyin 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 /ts/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas z is used instead in Jyutping.
• The initial ts represents /tsʰ/ in Cantonese Pinyin whereas c is used instead in Jyutping.
• To represent tones, the numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in Cantonese Pinyin, 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[edit]

Sample transcription of one of the 300 Tang Poems:

Jyutping input method[edit]

The Jyutping method (Chinese: 粵拼輸入法) refers to a family of input methods based on the Jyutping romanization system.

The Jyutping method allows a user to input Chinese characters by entering the Jyutping romanization of a Chinese character (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, Jyutping input with Traditional Chinese now comes standard on macOS under the name "Phonetic – Cantonese".

List of Jyutping keyboard input utilities[edit]

• TypeDuck (TypeDuck 打得粵拼輸入法)
• Online Jyutping Input Method (網上粵拼輸入法)
• MDBG Type Chinese
• Red Dragonfly (紅蜻蜓粵語拼音詞語輸入法)
• LSHK Jyutping for Mac (Mac OS 9 and macOS) (The page also includes Yale input version 0.2)
• Hong Kong Cantonese 2010 (via Microsoft Office IME 2010)
• Canton Easy Input (粵語拼音輸入法)
• Cantonese Phonetic IME (廣東話拼音輸入法) (also called 'Cantonese Phonetic IME (CPIME) Jyutping' in Windows 10^[5])
• RIME (小狼毫輸入法引擎)
• Gboard

See also[edit]

• Cantonese phonology

Footnotes[edit]

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Zee, Eric (1999). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 58–60. ISBN 0521652367.

External links[edit]

• Official website, from the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong

• Jyutping Pronunciation Guide
• 粵語拼盤: Learning the phonetic system of Cantonese
• Chinese Character Database (Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect)
• The CantoDict Project is a dedicated Cantonese-Mandarin-English online dictionary which uses Jyutping by default
• MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary (supports both Jyutping and Yale romanization)