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Changgi
but then it may be different for native speakers who learn them at a young age.
That is precisely my primary target group: young learners of Cantonese who do not already have Romanised sound associations programmed into their fresh minds.
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Changgi
That is because there is a stroke to indicate the height.
These tonal glyphs immediately follow full-height phonetic glyphs for reference (compare ㄧ⊃ (ji4) with ㄧ⊃ (ji1)). This seems like a sufficient visual distinction to me, but perhaps we just disagree.
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Changgi
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.
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.
I concede that, compared to un-augmented CPS, most Romanisation schemes are able to more accurately describe the sounds actually being spoken in colloquial speech (although Jyutping fails to adequately differentiate certain short vowels, whilst CPS expresses them exhaustively).
In light of this, perhaps CPS is better suited as a phonetic gloss for Standard Written Chinese. In other words, a system like Jyutping would be used for phonetically annotating written Cantonese, while Standard Written Chinese would be annotated with CPS. I believe this would work because most (if not all) of the inaccuracies you cite are issues with colloquial pronunciations. In purely literary recitation, my extensive studies have shown that vowel length is almost always a differentiating factor in the binary realisation of the Dark-Entering tone (with a few exceptions like 必 and its descendants). Furthermore, as far as I know, the 'rising-entering' tone is a null-point because practically every character in Standard Written Chinese has a literary reading that falls within one of the eight traditional categories.
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Changgi
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.
Hanyu Pinyin and Zhuyin Fuhao both regrettably share this 'an'/ㄢ ambiguity (I recently read that this usage was intended to more smoothly accommodate the 兒 suffix). CPS, however, does not; ㄢ is always 'an/t' and ㄚㄣ is always 'aan/t'. In fact, unless you count the entering tones as separate syllables, none of the CPS symbols ever considerably vary in their pronunciations.
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Changgi
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.
As I explained above, the phonetic glyphs I chose for CPS maintain very consistent pronunciations and, aside from the point about the tones, show no phonetic ambiguity (quite the opposite). There is no reason for 'a' to have its own symbol because it is impossible for it (or any short vowel for that matter) to exist without a coda.
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Changgi
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.
I would say that this is one of the very few prescriptive features of CPS, while acknowledging that most phonetic scripts are designed to be primarily descriptive. If I had it my way, CPS would lightly influence the way that the language is taught and spoken, and encouraging the gradual reunification of the Dark-Entering tone is indeed a part of my agenda (and the first step is to strongly emphasise the complementary distribution based on vowel length). Believe it or not, most dialects of Cantonese have split the Light-Entering tone as well, yet some of them have only two Entering tones total.
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Changgi
Read what I will say about vowel length not being phonemic
Phonemic or not, there lies an undeniable pattern that has been shown and explained many times. I chose to take advantage of this pattern.
[quoteWell 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,
They're native Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong and Macau, and not even they agree amongst themselves 100% of the time. Personally, I think that z/c/s are mostly alveolar, and it was only recently brought to my attention that postalveolar and alveolo-palatal allophones are quite common in some dialects and before certain vowels (I thought it wouldn't hurt to mention them).
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Changgi
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.
Technically speaking, you're right. It's not really about the actual duration (read: length) of the 'short' vowels, but rather their phonetic nature (and this goes for all short vowels, not just 'a'). The reason I define them as 'long' or 'short' is merely that I wish to classify them into two convenient groups (which, again, goes back to the pattern seen with the Dark-Entering tone). This separation of long and short vowels is actually a pretty common analysis of Cantonese, and you're right in that it doesn't correspond at all with the actual phonemically distinct durations found in Japanese vowels.
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Changgi
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.
This distinction may have existed at one time, but it exists no longer, and has therefore become redundant. In no context (of which I'm aware) do /i/ and /u/ begin with a glottal stop like the rest of the vowels in isolation. Rather, an isolated /i/ or /yu/ is always prefaced by an implicit or explicit /j/, and an isolated /u/ is prefaced by /w/ in the same manner.
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Changgi
I am not totally against a Jyutzyu system, but in my opinion, it needs to be much more consistent to be ideal.
For Mandarin Zhuyin, I agree, but for reasons I've highlighted above, CPS is far more consistent than its Mandarin cousin.
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Changgi
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.
They're learning Japanese so they've surely mastered the nearly 100 necessary Kana glyphs already. That's more demanding than learning CPS twice over, and with more exceptions too.
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Changgi
On ㄦ representing "eoi", do you not think it will confuse some learners who are already familiar or trying to learn zhuyin?
You could say the same thing about ㄜ representing 'oe', but it's as easy as an English-speaker like me learning that 'ji' is pronounced 'yee' Jyutping and 'gee' in Yale. It took me all of two seconds, and that was for the same language. It's simply not as likely that a content Zhuyin-toting Mandarin-speaking person from Taiwan will find the need to learn CPS, and vice versa. Besides, ㄦ and ㄜ are the only glyphs that bear no resemblance to the modern Mandarin forms, and their sounds do not even exist in Cantonese, and vice versa.
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Changgi
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.
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".
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.
This confusion you're talking about would only exist if they've become exposed and accustomed to Occidental phonological concepts, such as using the letters p/t/k to represent m/n/ng with entering tones. As far as I know, these concepts were introduced by European missionaries, and p/t/k codas were previously considered tonal variants of m/n/ng codas by Chinese scholars. To teach this concept to children is quite simple: "These are the sounds 'm', 'n', and 'ng', and they can come after vowel sounds. In different tones, 'aam' is pronounced like aam1, aam2, aam3, aap8, aam4, aam5, aam6, aap9". Thus, the young students will soon figure out that 'aap' has the pitch of tone 3, but they say the 'm' with a very sharp and abrupt cutoff. They will distinguish this from the pronunciation of the initial 'p', since that one has a release of air.
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Changgi
(Side note, I'm more interested in your project that represents the pronunciation of non-Min Chinese simultaneously)
I hope that I may find time to work on it more soon! :)