“CPS would indeed require them to learn 38 new symbols (37 in Taiwan ROC). Considering the thousands of complex characters necessary for literacy, 38 simple ones are a laughable matter.”
A friend has told me this as well, but as far as I know, Zhuyin has proven to be something that puts off people who know honji because they are difficult to remember and don’t have a familiar script.
Or conversely, people already learnt so many characters, putting more rather unnecessary characters for them might add to the pressure, but then it may be different for native speakers who learn them at a young age.
“'ve found that binary elevation (i.e. either upper-half or lower-half) is sufficiently distinct in handwriting. It isn't common for us to confuse 'P' and 'b' in reasonably clear handwriting”
That is because there is a stroke to indicate the height.
I realize when handwriting IPA people sometimes confuse the near-mid tones mostly because there isn’t a “height” for them to build upon and I had to emphasize on the lengths of the lines. And for your case you do not even have vertical lines. Unless it is very clear like in Eitel’s Romanization.
“By including the entering tone, I have significantly reduced the number of required phonetic glyphs (14 fewer).”
Then that’s a big flaw which I addressed elsewhere, about entering tone 2 and gap7 gap8.
It is not a “colloquial variation” in the sense of substandard “gonna”, “goin”, etc. This may work very differently in English, but as far as pronunciation goes, that is the only pronunciation, which as as real as pronunciation goes, you will hear when you are actually talking. You don’t hear people say “ngo5 mun4 haa6 zoeng6 kei4”, for instance.
If anything, the “colloquial”, so-called, pronunciation should have more status than the literary pronunciations, as the only times you will hear literary pronunciations is when people are reading a text say, from a book.
We may be in love with old pronunciations but as much as a living language goes, the “colloquial” part is the real part.
“Dark-Entering tone can be further divided into high-level and mid-level pitches, and even if some Light-Entering tone characters can become 'rising-entering' or 'tone 2' as you've pointed out.”
Technically that is a tone shift from tone 6 to tone 2, and for tone shifts from tone 4 or tone 6, they carry their (non-) aspiration, and putting them as dark entering tones only serves to confuse learners rather than to help them.
“need not have distinct symbols if they pose no conflict or ambiguity”
And that is the reason foreign learners keep pronouncing pinyin “yan” as “yahn” as opposed to “yen”, confusing the final –un, and pronounce “quan” wrongly. That is a major flaw all transcriptions ought to avoid, because it only makes it look dependent on an earlier Romanization (it is supposed to be ü but just because it doesn`t cause ambiguity it is omitted). All of my friends who are interested in linguistics disagree with the point.
On an and ang. I meant “a” having a symbol plus “ng” having its own symbol would reduce the clumsiness of using pinyin’s –an for the sound “en”. It would also be more consistent that way.
I do not see how that works out. final p/t/k’s being unreleased should be something taught in the first lesson or so and perhaps you could use the unaspirated symbols for those sounds, instead of the nasals.
I wouldn’t say I have heard any merging but I understand your view of them being allophonic, but as long as exceptions exists and that Cantonese is no longer the Middle Chinese we love, we cannot expect to put the glove of someone into another person’s hands.
“This has everything to do with vowel length”
Read what I will say about vowel length not being phonemic
Well I hope the professionals you consult with aren’t some of those people who mishear things a lot like the Portuguese who decided to Romanize Cantonese and Vietnamese. I’ve only ever seen sources indicating that they are alveolo-palatal which are misheard as postalveolar by most Westerners who I’ve talked with,
The difference between aa and a is not really a matter of vowel length, but rather a difference of the vowel itself. As you probably already know, the “short a” is a near-open vowel, not an open vowel. As for native speakers pronouncing “aa” when long, it is because a “long a” does not exist in the same way that diphthong+consonant does not exist so they pronounce them wrong.
As a native Cantonese speaker I have found it hard to learn say, Japanese where vowel length is phonemic “un” means yes but “uun” means no.
“'j/i' and 'w/u' are not really pure consonants anyway though, just semivowels that happen to occur as initials.”
The way I see it, yi and i were once distinct in Cantonese, having developed from nyi and i, but since the ny merged with y and i became merged with yi (a trait with Korean, Mandarin and Japanese as well), they became the same. Still I do not think it is easy on beginners. One could imagine writing the Iale Romanization in this fashion. When I see an i- initial I pronounce a non-syllabic i by instinct, not a /j/, and that could be a possible scenario for foreign learners too.
“It's a flat-out waste of time and space, and I'd rather the English language adopt the letter 'ŋ' to be honest...”
Well that is not really anyone’s fault…
“There's nothing about Latin-based alphabets that renders them inherently superior as a means of transliteration, it's merely how history played out. I'm not accusing you of sharing these sentiments yourself”
I do not share these thoughts. I am merely pointing out what people will think of it, and actually, has thought about it when I shared about zhuyin with my friends.
I am not totally against a Jyutzyu system, but in my opinion, it needs to be much more consistent to be ideal.
“As I mentioned previously, if a foreigner is prepared to learn a language with several thousands of complex characters, an extra 38 simple ones is nothing.”
That is precisely the problem. My friends treat Japanese kanji as some impossible task and they forget many kanji they come across, and when they remember a kanji with a high number of strokes they boast as if they have gotten a world record.
On ㄦ representing "eoi", do you not think it will confuse some learners who are already familiar or trying to learn zhuyin?
So yes, overall I'm sorry to say that I am not really satisfied with the Jyutzyu, and I feel that Jyutping, despite having flaws I could list, remains as the most consistent Cantonese pronunciation transcription in existence, if you do not count the one I made, or the modified IPA transcriptions which is not the one used in Wikipedia. Indicating p/t/k endings with m/n/ng also requires unnecessary time to "convert" them mentally, which is already the case when reading a text entirely in pinyin. This may even cause mispronunciations like an unreleased m. A sound shift existed in Vietnamese because of a bad Romanization, apparently (v vs u). Same mental conversion for the im entering tones, as it doesn't come across as long and short vowels to native speakers. Also, you're forgetting most people who are learning Cantonese are not linguists, and they don't understand the relationship between m and p, and it will only come across to them as chaotic and "you have to remember extra things".
You said it isn't meant to completely replace Romanizations but there is nothing to keep it from replacing, because the Education Bureau isn't teaching Cantonese Romanizations and is even discouraging the teaching of Cantonese. If your proposal passed, without being taught Romanizations, Jyutzyu will be the only accurate transcription they know (the other transcription being modified Eitel), and they'll have a lot of confusion, as "yim entering nasal" will be the only thing they get from it. Esperanto was meant to be an aux lang but apparently it sped up the extinction of some languages.
A similar thing I did though, was a voiced Cantonese notation, although it uses the Latin script. But it is more used for analyzes between Canto and other Chinese languages or Middle Chinese than an actual Cantonese pronunciation transcription itself.
(Side note, I'm more interested in your project that represents the pronunciation of non-Min Chinese simultaneously)
A friend has told me this as well, but as far as I know, Zhuyin has proven to be something that puts off people who know honji because they are difficult to remember and don’t have a familiar script.
Or conversely, people already learnt so many characters, putting more rather unnecessary characters for them might add to the pressure, but then it may be different for native speakers who learn them at a young age.
“'ve found that binary elevation (i.e. either upper-half or lower-half) is sufficiently distinct in handwriting. It isn't common for us to confuse 'P' and 'b' in reasonably clear handwriting”
That is because there is a stroke to indicate the height.
I realize when handwriting IPA people sometimes confuse the near-mid tones mostly because there isn’t a “height” for them to build upon and I had to emphasize on the lengths of the lines. And for your case you do not even have vertical lines. Unless it is very clear like in Eitel’s Romanization.
“By including the entering tone, I have significantly reduced the number of required phonetic glyphs (14 fewer).”
Then that’s a big flaw which I addressed elsewhere, about entering tone 2 and gap7 gap8.
It is not a “colloquial variation” in the sense of substandard “gonna”, “goin”, etc. This may work very differently in English, but as far as pronunciation goes, that is the only pronunciation, which as as real as pronunciation goes, you will hear when you are actually talking. You don’t hear people say “ngo5 mun4 haa6 zoeng6 kei4”, for instance.
If anything, the “colloquial”, so-called, pronunciation should have more status than the literary pronunciations, as the only times you will hear literary pronunciations is when people are reading a text say, from a book.
We may be in love with old pronunciations but as much as a living language goes, the “colloquial” part is the real part.
“Dark-Entering tone can be further divided into high-level and mid-level pitches, and even if some Light-Entering tone characters can become 'rising-entering' or 'tone 2' as you've pointed out.”
Technically that is a tone shift from tone 6 to tone 2, and for tone shifts from tone 4 or tone 6, they carry their (non-) aspiration, and putting them as dark entering tones only serves to confuse learners rather than to help them.
“need not have distinct symbols if they pose no conflict or ambiguity”
And that is the reason foreign learners keep pronouncing pinyin “yan” as “yahn” as opposed to “yen”, confusing the final –un, and pronounce “quan” wrongly. That is a major flaw all transcriptions ought to avoid, because it only makes it look dependent on an earlier Romanization (it is supposed to be ü but just because it doesn`t cause ambiguity it is omitted). All of my friends who are interested in linguistics disagree with the point.
On an and ang. I meant “a” having a symbol plus “ng” having its own symbol would reduce the clumsiness of using pinyin’s –an for the sound “en”. It would also be more consistent that way.
I do not see how that works out. final p/t/k’s being unreleased should be something taught in the first lesson or so and perhaps you could use the unaspirated symbols for those sounds, instead of the nasals.
I wouldn’t say I have heard any merging but I understand your view of them being allophonic, but as long as exceptions exists and that Cantonese is no longer the Middle Chinese we love, we cannot expect to put the glove of someone into another person’s hands.
“This has everything to do with vowel length”
Read what I will say about vowel length not being phonemic
Well I hope the professionals you consult with aren’t some of those people who mishear things a lot like the Portuguese who decided to Romanize Cantonese and Vietnamese. I’ve only ever seen sources indicating that they are alveolo-palatal which are misheard as postalveolar by most Westerners who I’ve talked with,
The difference between aa and a is not really a matter of vowel length, but rather a difference of the vowel itself. As you probably already know, the “short a” is a near-open vowel, not an open vowel. As for native speakers pronouncing “aa” when long, it is because a “long a” does not exist in the same way that diphthong+consonant does not exist so they pronounce them wrong.
As a native Cantonese speaker I have found it hard to learn say, Japanese where vowel length is phonemic “un” means yes but “uun” means no.
“'j/i' and 'w/u' are not really pure consonants anyway though, just semivowels that happen to occur as initials.”
The way I see it, yi and i were once distinct in Cantonese, having developed from nyi and i, but since the ny merged with y and i became merged with yi (a trait with Korean, Mandarin and Japanese as well), they became the same. Still I do not think it is easy on beginners. One could imagine writing the Iale Romanization in this fashion. When I see an i- initial I pronounce a non-syllabic i by instinct, not a /j/, and that could be a possible scenario for foreign learners too.
“It's a flat-out waste of time and space, and I'd rather the English language adopt the letter 'ŋ' to be honest...”
Well that is not really anyone’s fault…
“There's nothing about Latin-based alphabets that renders them inherently superior as a means of transliteration, it's merely how history played out. I'm not accusing you of sharing these sentiments yourself”
I do not share these thoughts. I am merely pointing out what people will think of it, and actually, has thought about it when I shared about zhuyin with my friends.
I am not totally against a Jyutzyu system, but in my opinion, it needs to be much more consistent to be ideal.
“As I mentioned previously, if a foreigner is prepared to learn a language with several thousands of complex characters, an extra 38 simple ones is nothing.”
That is precisely the problem. My friends treat Japanese kanji as some impossible task and they forget many kanji they come across, and when they remember a kanji with a high number of strokes they boast as if they have gotten a world record.
On ㄦ representing "eoi", do you not think it will confuse some learners who are already familiar or trying to learn zhuyin?
So yes, overall I'm sorry to say that I am not really satisfied with the Jyutzyu, and I feel that Jyutping, despite having flaws I could list, remains as the most consistent Cantonese pronunciation transcription in existence, if you do not count the one I made, or the modified IPA transcriptions which is not the one used in Wikipedia. Indicating p/t/k endings with m/n/ng also requires unnecessary time to "convert" them mentally, which is already the case when reading a text entirely in pinyin. This may even cause mispronunciations like an unreleased m. A sound shift existed in Vietnamese because of a bad Romanization, apparently (v vs u). Same mental conversion for the im entering tones, as it doesn't come across as long and short vowels to native speakers. Also, you're forgetting most people who are learning Cantonese are not linguists, and they don't understand the relationship between m and p, and it will only come across to them as chaotic and "you have to remember extra things".
You said it isn't meant to completely replace Romanizations but there is nothing to keep it from replacing, because the Education Bureau isn't teaching Cantonese Romanizations and is even discouraging the teaching of Cantonese. If your proposal passed, without being taught Romanizations, Jyutzyu will be the only accurate transcription they know (the other transcription being modified Eitel), and they'll have a lot of confusion, as "yim entering nasal" will be the only thing they get from it. Esperanto was meant to be an aux lang but apparently it sped up the extinction of some languages.
A similar thing I did though, was a voiced Cantonese notation, although it uses the Latin script. But it is more used for analyzes between Canto and other Chinese languages or Middle Chinese than an actual Cantonese pronunciation transcription itself.
(Side note, I'm more interested in your project that represents the pronunciation of non-Min Chinese simultaneously)