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Penkyamp ( Chinese: 拼音; Yale: ping1 yam1, Jyutping: ping1 jam1) or Cantonese pinyin, is a romanization system for transliterating Cantonese Chinese. It is a joint effort of enthusiasts in Guangzhou with a goal of devicing an alternative script to write Cantonese, replacing the standard Chinese characters plus the Cantonese folk characters. It is an attempt to standardize the language spoken by large number of residents in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Auckland, Vancouver and San Francisco, from the status of a vernacular to that of a literary language.
On the other hand, the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong adopts another Cantonese Romanization called Jyutping, which is not yet popularized among Cantonese-English or English-Cantonese dictionaries. The current most widely accepted system for Cantonese Romanization are Meyer-Wempe and Yale.
Both Penkyamp and Jyutping are attempts to improve from previous systems. The features of Penkyamp includes:
- reflects the vowel system of Cantonese more systematically than Jyutping by recognizing all long-short vowel contrasts,
- whereas Jyutping only recognizes short a and long a.
- indicates long and short vowels using the unique orthographic feature of altering the ending consonantA consonant is a sound in spoken language that is characterized by a constriction or closure at one or more points along the vocal tract. The word consonant comes from Latin meaning "sounding with" or "sounding together", the idea being that consonants do of the shengmu.
- does not have the ambiguous distinction between "oe" and "eu" (as in Jyutping).
- treats the two (not three) front-round vowels using the same silent vowel letter "e", placed before the substantial vowel
- categorizes the other front-round vowel (an underdeveloped one) as a short "o".
- does not use the consonant "j", which is used in traditional Cantonese anglicization as "z" instead of "y" (as in Jyutping).
The following descriptions applies to Penkyamp.
1 Alphabet
A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P (q) S T U W Y Z
Shengmus (Consonants aided by International Phonetic Alphabets. In order to see proper display of IPA, you must download a Unicode font)
- B [p] unaspirated
- C [tsʰ] aspirated
- D [t] unaspirated
- F [f]
- G [k] unaspirated
- H [h]
- K [kʰ] aspirated
- L [l]
- M [m]
- N [n]
- P [pʰ] aspirated
- S [s]
- T [tʰ] aspirated
- W [w]
- Y [j]
- Z [ts] unaspirated
Special Attention
- C is [tsʰ] as "tz" in Politzer.
- Z [tz] is the unaspirated form of C.
- q is a glottal stopThe glottal stop or voiceless glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is ?. The glottal stop is the [ʔ], Arabic "hamsa", as it appears in Cantonese interjection lâq, which is interchangeable with lâg.
