Cantonese Pinyin (Chinese: 常用字廣州話讀音表:拼音方案, also known as 教院式拼音方案) is a romanization system for Cantonese developed by Rev. Yu Ping Chiu (余秉昭) in 1971, and subsequently modified by the Education Department (merged into the Education and Manpower Bureau since 2003) of Hong Kong and Prof. 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.
Contents
The formal and short forms of the system's Chinese names mean respectively "the Cantonese Pronunciation list of Chinese Characters in Common Use romanization system" and "the romanization system of the Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau".
Pinyin
The Cantonese Pinyin 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 an English 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 an English letter, it is Romanized using English letters. Thus, /a/→aa, /ɐ/→a, /ɛ/→e, /ɔ/→o, /œ/→oe, /ŋ/→ng. This results in a system which is both easy to learn and type but is still useful for academics.
In the following table, the first row inside a cell shows the Cantonese Pinyin, 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.
Finals
Tones
Cantonese has nine tones in six distinct tone contours.
Comparison with Yale Romanization
Cantonese Pinyin and the Yale Romanization system represent Cantonese pronunciations with these same letters:
But they have these differences:
Comparison with Jyutping
Cantonese Pinyin and Jyutping represent Cantonese pronunciations with these same letters:
But they have these differences:
Examples
An old Chinese poem: