Sidney Lau Sek-cheung (; died 1987) was a

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

teacher in the Chinese Language Section of the Government Training Division and Principal of the Government Language School of the Hong Kong Government. He had graduated bachelor of arts from

Sun Yat-sen University Sun Yat-sen University (; SYSU) is a public university in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education, and co-funded by the Ministry of Education, SASTIND, and Guangdong Provincial Government. The university is p ...

Guangzhou Guangzhou, Chinese postal romanization, previously romanized as Canton or Kwangchow, is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Guangdong Provinces of China, province in South China, southern China. Located on the Pearl River about nor ...

, China.

Texts

Lau wrote a series of textbooks in the 1960s and 1970s, for teaching Anglophones to speak

. The textbooks were initially used for teaching western expatriates working in the

Hong Kong Police Force The Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) is the primary law enforcement, investigative agency, and largest Hong Kong Disciplined Services, disciplined service under the Security Bureau (Hong Kong), Security Bureau of Hong Kong. Pursuant to the one c ...

and other

government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a State (polity), state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive (government), execu ...

bodies. Later the texts were used as a basis for a radio teaching programme for foreigners. Lau's books introduced his own romanisation system which differs from the widely used Yale system and the nine other identified predecessors by using superscripted numbers to indicate the tones of the words, a method copied 16 years later by the creators of the little used but academically favoured

Jyutping The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme, 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 ro ...

. The third system in general use in Hong Kong after Lau and Yale is the Hong Kong Government or "Standard Romanisation" system developed by James D Ball and Ernst J Eitel, and upon which Lau's was largely based. Lau's ''A Practical Cantonese-English Dictionary'', with 22,000 Cantonese entries, was published by the Hong Kong government in 1977, and reviewed favorably by Dew in the ''Journal of Chinese Linguistics''.

Current use

Despite five decades since publication, the books remain popular, being among the few comprehensive courses teaching spoken Cantonese (as opposed to

written Chinese Written Chinese is a writing system that uses Chinese characters and other symbols to represent the Chinese languages. Chinese characters do not directly represent pronunciation, unlike letters in an alphabet or syllabograms in a syllabary. Rath ...

and spoken

Mandarin Mandarin or The Mandarin may refer to: Language * Mandarin Chinese, branch of Chinese originally spoken in northern parts of the country ** Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Mandarin, the official language of China ** Taiwanese Mandarin, Stand ...

, which are significantly different).

References

External links

Explanation of Sidney Lau's Cantonese Romanization System
Year of birth missing 1987 deaths Hong Kong educators Linguists from China Sun Yat-sen University alumni Cantonese language {{HongKong-writer-stub

Texts

Current use

See also

References

External links