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 romanisation of its Chinese name, ) is a contraction of the official name, and it consists of the first Chinese characters of the terms ''jyut6 jyu5'' () and ''ping3 jam1'' (; pronounced '' pīnyīn'' in Mandarin).

Despite being intended as a system to indicate pronunciation, it has also been employed in —in effect, elevating Jyutping from its assistive status to a written language.

History

The Jyutping system departs from all previous Cantonese romanisation systems (approximately 12, including Robert Morrison's pioneering work of 1828, and the widely used Standard Romanization, Yale and Sidney Lau systems) by introducing z and c initials and the use of eo and oe in finals, as well as replacing the initial y, used in all previous systems, with j.

In 2018, it was updated to include the -a and -oet finals, to reflect syllables recognized as part of Cantonese phonology in 1997 by the Jyutping Work Group of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

Initials

Finals

* Only the finals ''m'' and ''ng'' can be used as standalone nasal syllables.
* Used for elided words in casual speech such as ''a6'' in 四十四 (''sei3 a6 sei3''), elided from ''sei3 sap6 sei3''.
* Referring to the colloquial pronunciation of these words.
* Used for onomatopoeias such as ''oet6'' for belching or ''goet4'' for snoring.

Tones

There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese. However, as three of the nine are entering tones (), which only appear in syllables ending with ''p'', ''t'', and ''k'', they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping (though they do in the ILE romanization of Cantonese; these are shown in parentheses in the table below). A mnemonic which some use to remember this is zh, t=風水到時我哋必發達, j=fung1 seoi2 dou3 si4 ngo5 dei6 bit1 faat3 daat6, labels=no or " Feng Shui ictates thatwe will be lucky."

Comparison with Yale romanisation

Jyutping and the Yale romanisation of Cantonese represent Cantonese pronunciations with the same letters in:
* The initials: ''b'', ''p'', ''m'', ''f'', ''d'', ''t'', ''n'', ''l'', ''g'', ''k'', ''ng'', ''h'', ''s'', ''gw'', ''kw'', ''w''.
* The vowel: ''aa'' (except when used alone), ''a'', ''e'', ''i'', ''o'', ''u'', ''yu''.
* The nasal stop: ''m'', ''ng''.
* The coda: ''i'', ''u'', ''m'', ''n'', ''ng'', ''p'', ''t'', ''k''.
But they differ in the following:
* The vowels ''eo'' and ''oe'' represent and respectively in Jyutping, whereas the ''eu'' represents both vowels in Yale.
* The initial ''j'' represents in Jyutping whereas ''y'' is used instead in Yale.
* The initial ''z'' represents in Jyutping whereas ''j'' is used instead in Yale.
* The initial ''c'' represents in Jyutping whereas ''ch'' is used instead in Yale.
* In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel ''yu'', then the initial ''j'' is appended before the vowel. In Yale, the corresponding initial ''y'' is never appended before ''yu'' under any circumstances.
* Jyutping defines five finals not in Yale: ''a'' '', eu'' , ''em'' , ''ep'' , oet . These finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as ''deu6'' (), ''lem2'' (), and ''gep6'' ().
* To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping whereas Yale traditionally uses tone marks together with the letter ''h'' (though tone numbers can be used in Yale as well).

Comparison with ILE romanisation

Jyutping and ILE romanisation represent Cantonese pronunciations with the same letters in:
* The initials: ''b'', ''p'', ''m'', ''f'', ''d'', ''t'', ''n'', ''l'', ''g'', ''k'', ''ng'', ''h'', ''s'', ''gw'', ''kw'', ''j'', ''w''.
* The vowel: ''aa'', ''a'', ''e'', ''i'', ''o'', ''u''.
* The nasal stop: ''m'', ''ng''.
* The coda: ''i'' (except for its use in the coda in Jyutping; see below), ''u'', ''m'', ''n'', ''ng'', ''p'', ''t'', ''k''.
But they have some differences:
* The vowel ''oe'' represents both and in ILE whereas ''eo'' and ''oe'' represent and respectively in Jyutping.
* The vowel ''y'' represents in ILE whereas both ''yu'' (used in the nucleus) and ''i'' (used in the coda of the final -''eoi'') are used in Jyutping.
* The initial ''dz'' represents in ILE whereas ''z'' is used instead in Jyutping.
* The initial ''ts'' represents in ILE whereas ''c'' is used instead in Jyutping.
* To represent tones, the numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in ILE, although the use of 1, 3, 6 to replace 7, 8, 9 for the checked tones is acceptable. However, only the numbers 1 to 6 are used in Jyutping.

Examples

Sample transcription of one of the ''300 Tang Poems'':

Jyutping input method

The Jyutping method () refers to a family of input methods based on the Jyutping romanization system.

The Jyutping method allows a user to input Chinese characters by entering the Jyutping romanization of a Chinese character (with or without tone, depending on the system) and then presenting the user with a list of possible characters with that pronunciation.

As of macOS Ventura, Jyutping input with Traditional Chinese now comes standard on macOS under the name "Phonetic – Cantonese".

List of Jyutping keyboard input utilities

TypeDuck
()
Online Jyutping Input Method
()
MDBG Type Chinese
for Mac ( Mac OS 9 and macOS) (The page also includes Yale input version 0.2)
Hong Kong Cantonese 2010
(via Microsoft Office IME 2010)

() (also called 'Cantonese Phonetic IME (CPIME) Jyutping' in Windows 10
/ref>)
RIME
()
* Gboard

See also

* Cantonese phonology

Footnotes

References

Further reading

*

External links

Official website
from the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong

{{lang, yue, 粵語拼盤
Learning the phonetic system of Cantonese

Chinese Character Database (Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect)

The CantoDict Project
is a dedicated Cantonese-Mandarin-English online dictionary which uses Jyutping by default

MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary (supports both Jyutping and Yale romanization)
Languages of Hong Kong
Cantonese romanisation
Writing systems introduced in 1993
1993 establishments in Hong Kong