Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation

The Hong Kong Government uses an unpublished system of Romanisation of Cantonese for public purposes which is based on the 1888 standard described by Roy T Cowles in 1914 as Standard Romanisation.^[1]:iv The primary need for Romanisation of Cantonese by the Hong Kong Government is in the assigning of names to new streets and places. It has not formally or publicly disclosed its method for determining the appropriate Romanisation in any given instance.

Method

Currently, government departments, particularly the Survey and Mapping Office of the Lands Department, consult the Chinese Language Department of the Civil Service Bureau before gazetting names and the latter vet proposed names using the Three Way Chinese Commercial/Telegraphic Code Book, originally published by the Royal Hong Kong Police Force Special Branch for internal government use in 1971. The code book system is devoid of any tone indications and, being grossly simplified, is susceptible to confusion.

Although the code book has only been available for several decades, the Romanisation approach for place names in Hong Kong has been broadly consistent since before 1888. This can be seen in maps of the period^[2] and in the government's publication A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories of 1960.

Typical features

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.

Spelling

All tones are omitted as are distinctions between aspirated and unaspirated stops. The distinctions between the long vowel [a] and the short vowel [ɐ] are omitted like Fat (發, [fat]) and Fat (佛, [fɐt]).

Some of the inconsistencies are due to a distinction that has been lost historically (a distinction between palatal and alveolar sounds, viz. ch versus ts, sh versus s, and j versus z). These consonants are no longer distinguished in present-day speech.

Under the following table, geographical names are used to illustrate. (Biographical names are not used as people have the right to decide how their names be romanised, although the same rule usually applies.)

References

See also

• List of common Chinese surnames shows how they are romanised in this scheme.

External links

• 粵語拼盤: Learning the Phonetic System of Cantonese
• Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK)
• Jyutping Pronunciation Guide