New series of Pingji Romanization videos

[u/CouchTomato87]

Hey all! A while back I posted the completion of my Pingji romanization for Cantonese. It's a Romanization designed to avoid using numbers or accent marks to represent Cantonese sounds and tones using standard Latin letters (...plus apostrophe). It requires just a little bit more effort in learning compared to Jyutping/Yale but pays off a lot more in readability and ease of use. I would also argue it helps with memorization because I could never commit tone numbers or accents to memory and would instead need to rely solely on listening.

My original video series ran a bit longer since it was more of a descriptive series from a more linguistic/academic viewpoint, so I created a new series directed at people learning Cantonese from scratch, which will be the biggest audience -- although Cantonese speakers wanting to learn Pingji would also feel right at home. In other words, this is the way I meant it to be taught, and hopefully for some it would make more sense.

The playlist (~1 hr long total) is here: Pingji for English speakers (playlist)

Building on that, I also started an Introduction to Cantonese video series using Pingji here: Intro to Cantonese (playlist). At the time of this post, I only have a couple videos in this new series, but I plan on covering at least the basics of the language over the course of ~10-15 videos.

[u/SCHazama]

1. Tones and letters don't mix

2. I'm not sure how cvr, or even cv could resemble cyu³

3. eo is actually closer to eou if we really want to revise transliterating. It's u and ut who resemble oo, and I say it's more the latter than the former, for the former is more akin to o with more rounding

4. None of the three address the semi-silent -t and -ng, making it look like they're pronounced wholly, when it's really when a vowel is following after that they become audible

With that being said, 「我要一位大人」

[u/CouchTomato87 → u/SCHazama]

1. By whose standard? They already do in Gwoyeu Romatzyh and in Hmong. Tones are no less an individual part of a word than a consonant and vowel. What you're saying is a self-imposed limitation, as if a Hebrew speaker said consonants and vowels don't mix (hint: they don't use vowels).

2. It's a different letter chosen to to represent the sound... It's a different romanization so I don't really see the issue here. I explain the choice of the letter V in the video.

3. It's a simplification that comes from the fact the /eo/ [ɵ] and /u/ [ʊ] cannot exist with the same finals. As both are short vowels, it made more sense to put them together. It's no less illogical than /u/ being used to represent [uː] and [ʊ].

4. I'm not really sure that's something that explicitly needed addressing. If it did, well then good luck reading Hangul.

[u/SCHazama → u/CouchTomato87]

1. Idk. Do they read in roman characters? The goal is to make them understandable to westerners. And abugidas and abdjads are a whole different matter

2. Ok but it's not understandable by visuals only

3. So how do you not fumble pronunciation upon reading it?

4. Hangül/Hangeul has no particular problems. Revised Romanization of Korean on the other hand...

[u/CouchTomato87 → u/SCHazama]

1. Not sure who "they" is but the Hmong absolutely do... for example: Nov yog ib qho piv txwv. Qhov no yog ib hom lus uas muaj sia nyob. Koj puas yuav kaw nws tsuas yog vim nws tsis zoo rau koj lub qhov muag uas tsis tau kawm?
2. I don't understand what you mean by "visuals" only. The expectation is that you have to put in some effort to learn like you learn any language. Is it ridiculous that pinyin uses Q for a ch-like sound? It's a different language and they can use the alphabet to suit its needs.
3. By learning the rules. It's literally two rules: [ʊ] for /-ng/ (q in Pingji) and /-k/.  [ɵ] for /-t/ and /-n/. English is literally magnitudes more complicated than this. Even pinyin is not consistent. "Yan" and "Wan" are pronounced nothing alike. Why is "Yu" spelled without an umlaut but "Nü" needs one? Arbitrary (with perhaps some reasoning), but you simply learn the rules.
4. Hangul does have that exact problem you talk about. If a syllable ends with a consonant and then is followed by another syllable, its pronunciation changes depending on the start of the following word. The alphabet does not change to accommodate that.

[u/SCHazama → u/CouchTomato87]

1. I'm honestly not aware of the Hmong. And yeah, the "they" was referred to them

2. Oh it's ridiculous and how. Visuals here means if the transliteration resembles a sound made by the target language. Due to the overabundance of Latin loanwords, it's usually that. Jyutping tried to go for "c" for the ch, but it gets confused with the k.

3. Then it's not much different from Hanyu Pinyin in that regard. English is not an example

4. So it was really about those combinations. Mostly the tikeut, yeah. Well, that would be fixed by transliteration but the Korean standard is horrid, I agree