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The Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation (''not'' an official name) is the more or less consistent way for romanising Cantonese proper nouns employed by the Hong Kong Government departments and many non-governmental organisations in Hong Kong. It is not known whether there are strict guidelines for the method circulating in the government, or the method has just established itself and become a common practice over time. The system has been widely used by the Hong Kong Government from the very early days of British rule, and has since gone through some changes between the two World Wars. The convention is similar to the one devised by Ernst Johann Eitel, which is likely German-based. Since the method is not standardised, Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau has approved a Cantonese Pinyin system for teachers in primary and secondary schools. Besides this, the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong promotes their own Jyutping system. Both schemes are employed by the government to illustrate accurate pronunciation of Cantonese words. This article illustrates and explains how the proper nouns in Hong Kong are transcribed and romanised, and lists the corresponding pronunciations of the spellings with respect to IPA and Jyutping. ==Usage== The Hong Kong Government adopts the Eitel/Dyer-Ball system of romanisation, which is based on the spoken Cantonese language. It was first adopted in 1960 to standardise the romanisation of placenames throughout Hong Kong (the standardised placenames were published in the 1960 government publication 'A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories'. Prior to this 1960 publication, there was no standard, consistent way of romanising placenames in the territory, which, predictably, often led to confusion. Since then, the romanisation system has been extended to the names of local Chinese, which gives romanised Hong Kong Chinese names a distinctive character. For place names, the type of the place in English (e.g., "Street" and "Road") are often used instead of a romanisation (which would have been "Kai" and "Lo" in the previous example), with just a handful of rare exceptions (for example, the "Fong" in "Lan Kwai Fong", which would have been a "Square" if a translation were used). "Wan" and "Bay", "Tsuen" (or "Chuen") and "Estate" (or "Village"), are, however, equally common. Some places, such as "Un Long", was later renamed as "Yuen Long" according to this standard, with the exception "Un Chau Estate" / "Un Chau Street Estate". Nonetheless, the names "Hong Kong" and "Kowloon" are not transliterated based on this system, as they were already named as such prior to the founding of the colony. When the romanisations are spoken in an English conversation, they are pronounced in a somewhat anglicised manner. All words are consistently pronounced in tone equivalent to the Yin Ping tone or tone 1. A good everyday example is the broadcast of station names on MTR trains. Some instant messaging users, having problems typing in Chinese characters, model this rule of romanisation for communication, but they use voiced instead of voiceless unaspirated consonants, such as using 'b', 'd' or 'g' where this system may have used 'p', 't' or 'k'. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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