Readers 读者
Abstract
摘要
Kwan-hin Cheung 张群显; Robert S. Bauer 包睿舜
Abstract 摘要
Among Asia’s four major Chinese speech communities of the mainland of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, Hong Kong distinguishes itself by being predominantly Cantonese speaking in both formal and informal social domains. Here children have traditionally learned to read the standard, complex Chinese characters with their Cantonese pronunciations. A related phenomenon has been the spontaneous development of a nonstandardized, unofficial, and informal written counterpart of spoken Cantonese, which has now become widely used in Hong Kong newspapers, public notices, comic books, novels, play scripts, advertisements, graffiti, etc. This two-part monograph introduces written Cantonese in its Hong Kong context, delineates the conventions on which it is based, describes the authors’ recently completed research project in which a computerized database on the transcription of Cantonese with Chinese characters was compiled, and identifies some of the problems associated with the computer-processing of Cantonese.
The unique contribution of the monograph is that it has systematically brought together in one volume 1,095 different Cantonese characters; classified them in three appendices according to their availability in computerized Chinese character sets; listed their computer access codes in the regular Big-5 system and the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set; Romanized their Cantonese pronunciation (including variant forms); glossed them in English; illustrated their usage; and cited the sources from which the characters have been taken. In addition, for the reader’s ease of reference the three appendices of Cantonese characters have been merged into two lexicons: Lexicon 1 has alphabetized all the Cantonese characters by their Romanized pronunciations; and Lexicon 2 has listed all the Cantonese characters by the traditional numbers of their radicals and stroke counts.