Talk:Written Cantonese

message: I quote: On the other hand, some of the characters have only been corrupted in Cantonese, not disappeared in Standard Chinese. For instance, the common word leng3 (meaning pretty) is usually written with the character 靚 in Cantonese (the character has another meaning in standard Chinese). The word should rather be written with the character 令, as 令 used as an adjective to mean "pretty" still survives in the idiom 巧言令色 (roughly meaning "skillful talk and pretty manners")."
I don't know if corruption is a NPOV statement.  Also, 靚 can be pronounced Liang4 .  The word 靚女 in mandarin means "a pretty woman."  It isn't very colloquially however, and probably has classical roots.  It may very well be that 靚  and 令 share the same root in the spoken language.  BTW--The idiom you are citing comes from the Analeccts, and there are very few situations where "ling" mantains that meaning in modern standard Chinese.
207.76.182.20 20:15, 5 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "on corruption"

message: In anicent Chinese it was written as 忌, but I can't find the poem where it was mentioned.
geckokid 82.39.41.172 00:03, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I would have thought that 嘅 evolved from 個 as that character is used as a possessive in quite a few dialects as well. Also, some cantonese people still sound like they're saying 個 instead. But the use of 忌 is very interesting, hope you find it :)  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.147.43.82 (talk) 05:30, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  From Kangxi Zidian: 《正韻》吉器切，𠀤音懻。語助辭。《詩·鄭風》叔善射忌。"Zhengyun: Fanqie of 吉 and 器 (gei3), and sounds like 懻 (kei3). Grammatical particle. Poem by Zhengfeng: It is that uncle is good at shooting."As far as I know 嘅 is an actual possessive marker, while 個 is just a counter in the possessive construction SUBJECT+COUNTERofOBJECT+OBJECT.Micro01 (talk) 23:26, 24 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  嘅 

message: The proper tone for 冇 is mou2, not mou5.  I believe it's evolved from 唔有, m5 jau2 -> mau2.
-spetz- —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 68.44.195.34 (talk • contribs).
:No, that's not true.  冇 is pronounced mou5, not mou2.  有 is also jau5, not jau2.  唔有 is not attested historically either.  冇 has its roots from 無 (mou4), a word that has been around for thousands of years, but the tone shifted to mou5 in order to align with the the tone of 有.  Such tone alignment occurred in other Cantonese words as well, such as the pronouns 我 (ngo5), 你 (nei5), and 佢 (keoi5).  I don't remember the reference where I originally read about this, but I believe 佢 used to be 4th tone (陽平) instead of 5th (陽上) as well.  —Umofomia 05:50, 27 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the confusion may possibly stem from the fact that 2nd and 5th tones are currently undergoing a merger in Hong Kong Cantonese. (Bauer, R., Cheung, K.-H., and Cheung, P.-M. 2003. Variation and merger of the rising tones in Hong Kong Cantonese. Language Variation and Change 15:211-225.) Mike barrie 07:16, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

text: I always thought that 冇 mou5 evolved from 没有 (trad. 沒有) mut6 jau5. --71.141.156.137 (talk) 01:53, 12 July 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: 沒有 is a relatively new term in Chinese language comparing to 無. It is unlikely it is the root of 冇. — HenryLi (Talk) 04:35, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Which is understandable since the word "無" is homophonic in Mandarin to a bunch of other words. Hillgentleman (talk) 20:48, 9 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  無 / 冇 

message: One thing that isn't clear from the article but obviously needs to be mentioned... I believe it's the case that most written Cantonese (particularly in Hong Kong) still generally uses the traditional form of characters from Standard Mandarin correct? Nil Einne (talk) 16:32, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That was certainly my impression too.  --FeralOink (talk) 20:37, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Simplified vs traditional

message: Way too much info at Standard Cantonese, more than here, which is supposed to be the 'main article'. Some should be moved here. kwami (talk) 21:30, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  merge 

message: I noticed that in the handy little speech particles list, someone claimed 叻 is Singapore. If I am not mistaken, they have got this mixed up with 加. One is "lek" ("smart/clever"), the other is "chia/jia" (add/plus). Whoever put that there, it is wrong. ★Dasani★ 01:01, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  加 = 叻? 

message: *Mandarin:  (adv. very) - Cantonese: 
Took the liberty, but Mandarin uses "好" for a similar if not same meaning, too. ex: 好多, 好快, etc.
:Hm, like "pretty" in English. — kwami (talk) 12:34, 2 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cantonese Words 

message: I'm just curious, do Cantonese people ever use written Cantonese characters to name their children? --164.67.190.148 (talk) 22:40, 5 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: No is the short answer. Akerbeltz (talk) 13:55, 31 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  In names? 

message: This section as written is nonsensical, or at best obscure to a reader who doesn't know Chinese. [Numbering added for discussion.]:
:Some characters used to represent words in Cantonese are synonyms of words used in standard written Chinese. For example, 
:#the character for "not" (不) is the synonym of 唔, 
:#the third-person pronoun (他 "he/she") is a synonym of 佢,  
Synonyms are different words in the same language/variety that have almost identical or similar meanings. But the basis of this article is that Cantonese is not the same as Standard Chinese either in spoken or in written form; and therefore we should speak of "equivalents" or "translations", not of "synonyms". From studying the example chart, I think that the writer meant something like this:
:# Written Cantonese uses 唔 (Yale romanization: m̀h) for "not", corresponding to Mandarin 不 (Pinyin: bú). Similarly:
:# Cantonese 佢 (keúih) "he/she" corresponds to Mandarin 他 (tā)
and so on.
The paragraph should be corrected and retitled, perhaps along these lines, by someone who knows Cantonese; and the writing should be checked by someone with a good command of English idiom and the terminology used. --Thnidu (talk) 13:44, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Synonyms 

message: I'm unsure why famous pop singer Wong Jim is described as being a pioneer of written Cantonese. I can think of some scenarios why this might be true. However, since Wong Jim was a singer, there is the implication of oral tradition. Now I do realize that Wong Jim was not a flighty pop star. He was a graduate of LaSalle or a similar college, and WP says that he even studied, perhaps completed a Ph.D. program in sociology. Yet the statement in Section 1: History should be elaborated upon with at least a sentence of explanation. --FeralOink (talk) 20:45, 28 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Please cite sources for late Wong Jim as pioneer of written Cantonese 

message: The romanisation of Cantonese is pretty inconsistent. Some pages, like this one, are completely in Yale, but others are in Jyutping. Some of the best resources in Cantonese, like CantoDict, are Jyutping-preferred. I would like to change the romanisations on this page to Jyutping, or at least add them alongside the existing Yale entries.
70.190.51.10 (talk) 14:43, 7 September 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Romanisation 

message: Yes, anonymous person, you're missing something.
Possibly several things.  The one immediately relevant to your question is the fact that literally different words can have the same meaning.  "Just think for a second," "Consider what it might mean," and "Look at it closely and see if the parts give me the meaning of the whole," all have exactly the same meaning, namely "Let me act appropriately in this situation of puzzlement, rather than making a fool of myself by posting an extremely stupid question in public."
 
David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 14:40, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Answer 

message: About the time that Hong Kong rejoined China the Cantonese Language Society (that's not quite its name, but you'll know it when you run across it) published an electronic word processor as freeware.  Very small, it reminded me of the old days when Bluebeard, only 40K in DOS, emulated WordStar, WordPerfect and the now long extinct dominant IBM word processor of the time.
 
One of the features of this marvel that stayed with me was that it contained, it said, about 1,000 glyphs used for writing sounds peculiar to the Cantonese language family!
Now that I've signed up for a Cantonese course with Cantonese-101.com, I went looking for it again, but couldn't find it.
 
I hope that people interested in the language will keep their eyes open for it, as shall I.  If you find it, maybe add its URL to this article, and a note below here saying that you've done so. 
 
谢谢   <= As you can see, I don't know how to do this in Cantonese. Yet.  :-)
 
David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 14:32, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know of it myself but I think standalone programs are much less common today. It's more usual and useful to use an input method, i.e. a plugin to the OS that lets you enter characters in any app. A modern OS comes with many builtin, or you can download them. For Cantonese which isn't as widely supported in OSes as Putonghua/Pinyin there are a number of third party input methods, some of which are listed here: Jyutping#Jyutping input method.--JohnBlackburnewordsdeeds 15:29, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Cantonese Word Processor 

message: "...there is still significant disagreement about which characters are correct in written Cantonese, as many of the Cantonese words existed as descendants of Old Chinese words, but are being replaced by some new invented Cantonese words due to the Hong Kong Government's lack of knowledge about some of the Cantonese words..."
Can we have a source for this? This is very interesting, and I would really like to read more research on this. 
104.157.136.51 (talk) 01:35, 3 January 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Forgotten Cantonese Words 

message: The beginning of this article runs: 
Written Cantonese is the written form of Cantonese, the most complete written form of Chinese after that for Mandarin Chinese. Written Chinese was originally developed for Classical Chinese, and was the main literary language of China until the 19th century. Written vernacular Chinese first appeared in the 17th century and a written form of Mandarin became standard throughout China in the early 20th century.[1] While texts written in this system can in principle be read word for word in other Chinese varieties, this sounds unnatural because of differences in idiom, grammar, and usage. Modern Cantonese speakers have therefore developed their own written script, sometimes creating new characters for words that either do not exist or have been lost in standard Chinese.
I am kind of confused by the bold section: 'this system' is ambiguous, since the preceding sentences mention several written forms; does 'this' refer to written Cantonese, written vernacular Chinese, or written Mandarin? Please clarify. 
Harumei (talk) 15:51, 23 August 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  First Paragraph 

message: Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just modified 2 external links on Written Cantonese. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20050911014640/http://hanyu.chi.cuhk.edu.hk/ to http://hanyu.chi.cuhk.edu.hk/
*Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20050906223200/http://www.yueyu.net/ to http://www.yueyu.net/
When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.
Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 03:54, 30 December 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links modified