Dr. Chaak-Ming Lau
Founder of Words.hk (粵典)
The Hong Kong Jyutping Edition is finally out! This should be the first book in Hong Kong with its whole text annotated in Jyutping. Many thanks to Tsoi Wai-chuen for giving us the chance to add Jyutping to this book; thanks to Tsui Chung-man, Chan Wing-yan and Pang Hoi-lam for helping with the proofreading, and to Words.hk (words.hk), Hambaanglaang (冚唪唥粵文, hambaanglaang.hk), PyCantonese and the Cantonese Computational Linguistics Infrastructure group CanCLID for their technical support.
Having thanked everyone, I’d like to share how I feel. Promoting Jyutping really isn’t easy. Many people assume at the outset that promoting Jyutping is pointless: Hong Kong’s literacy rate is close to 100%, and anyone who can read written Cantonese certainly knows Chinese characters, so isn’t adding Jyutping to a whole book just making work for yourself?
Allow me to answer with an example. When I studied at the University of Hong Kong I went to the Main Building every day. At the side door there was a very ugly sloping ramp, which looked out of place beside the stone columns and wooden floors of a century-old building and spoiled the whole classical look. It was only when I once moved things with a hand trolley myself that I understood how useful that ramp is in front of a two-inch step. I feel that making a Jyutping edition is like levelling the roads, installing ramps and slopes, and building better railings. Think of friends who are learning Cantonese, think of people passing Cantonese on overseas; I hope you won’t mind that Jyutping has been added above the characters, and that you’ll support us in installing a few ramps in the right places to help those who need them. Every written-Cantonese book we make and every piece of Jyutping material we produce is a good deed done for Cantonese. We don’t dare say we can change the world on our own, but I firmly believe that if many people each spend a little time pitching in a pebble (揼石仔) and doing things that seem useless, in the end it will make our world a better place.
I could write several thousand more words on why Jyutping should be added, but I’d rather take the chance to share how we added it. The book has more than twenty thousand characters. To speed things up, we did not add Jyutping by hand: we first used PyCantonese for word segmentation and Jyutping, then proofread the polyphonic characters by hand (畫 waa2/waak6, 上 soeng5/soeng6 and so on). After a quick read-through with the naked eye, we fed the text and Jyutping into a text-to-speech system and listened to the audio to find the ones that had slipped through. Promoting Jyutping doesn’t mean living like an ascetic; we just make good use of the tools to go one small step further, and the process isn’t very hard. I hope other authors will consider making a Jyutping edition too.
25 June 2021 @Hong Kong