Site Notes
This site is Unicode UTF-8 encoded.
On this site I give the Cantonese pronunciation first (the dialect I speak), then the Mandarin pronunciation in parenthesis (the most widely spoken dialect) and then 中文.
For example: Hoiping (Kaiping) 開平
Instead of making up my own spelling for all the Chinese words, I'm using jyutping romanization system for Cantonese and pinyin for Mandarin. Romanization is the practice of using the Roman alphabet to represent and spell the sounds of another language.
*Notes about the gapou (jiapu) 家譜 English translations
- The Chinese names and places are written in Cantonese jyutping, (Mandarin pinyin), and 中文.
- The stuff in between the brackets [ ] are notes that I added.
- My mommy did most of the translation. Professor Rhoads from the University of Texas (one of my former Asian Studies professors) and Kevin Lee (webmaster at Siyi Genealogy) helped translate some of the phrases that my mommy didn't know.
- I did a rough conversion of the dates from the Chinese lunar calendar to the Western calendar. So if there are any mistakes with the dates, whoops, my bad.
Cantonese Jyutping
Unlike Mandarin, there is no internationally recognized romanization standard for Cantonese. Yale, Lau, and jyutping are some of the more widely used romanization systems for Cantonese.
I'm using jyutping because the Hong Kong government is now pushing jyutping as the official romanization system. Jyutping uses numbers to represent the tones.
The only time I don't use jyutping is for the spelling of my last name. My family spells their surname as "Kwan," in jyutping it is spelled "Gwaan."
| tone | description | |
|---|---|---|
| fan 1 | high level | high level flat tone |
| fan 2 | mid rising | starts mid level, rises to high |
| fan 3 | mid level | mid level flat tone |
| fan 4 | low falling | starts at mid level, falls to low |
| fan 5 | low rising | starts at low level, rises to mid |
| fan 6 | low level | low level flat tone |
For an overview of jyutping visit the jyutping page at chinalanguage.com or Jyutping Pronunciation Guide.
Mandarin - Pinyin
Pinyin is the internationally recognized standard system of romanizing Mandarin.
Pinyin uses a series of tonal markings above each syllable to represent the five tones in Mandarin. However since you need a special font to represent the tonal markings, I'm using numbers to represent the tones.
| tone | description | ||
|---|---|---|---|
|
ma 1 | high tone | high level flat tone |
|
ma 2 | rising | starts in the middle and rises to high |
|
ma 3 | dipping | starts in middle dips to low and returns to the middle |
|
ma 4 | falling | starts high and falls to low |
|
ma 5 | neutral | no tone |
For a quick overview of how to use pinyin visit the pinyin page at chinalanguage.com. For more detailed explanation visit China West Exchange.