The name Jyutping (itself the Jyutping romanisation of its Chinese name, 粵拼) is a contraction of the official name, and it consists of the first Chinese characters of the terms jyut6 jyu5 (粵語, meaning "Yue language") and ping3 jam1 (拼音 "phonetic alphabet", also pronounced as "pinyin" in Mandarin).
Despite being intended as a system to indicate pronunciation, it has also been employed in writing Cantonese as an alphabetic language—in effect, elevating Jyutping from its assistive status to a written language.
The Jyutping system[1] departs from all previous Cantonese romanisation systems (approximately 12, including Robert Morrison's pioneering work of 1828, and the widely used Standard Romanization, Yale and Sidney Lau systems) by introducing z and c initials and the use of eo and oe in finals, as well as replacing the initial y, used in all previous systems, with j.[2]
In 2018, it was updated to include the -a and -oet finals, to reflect syllables recognized as part of Cantonese phonology in 1997 by the Jyutping Work Group of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.[3]
There are nine tones in six distinct tone contours in Cantonese. However, as three of the nine are entering tones (入聲; jap6 sing1), which only appear in syllables ending with p, t, and k, they do not have separate tone numbers in Jyutping (though they do in the ILE romanization of Cantonese; these are shown in parentheses in the table below). A mnemonic which some use to remember this is 風水到時我哋必發達; fung1 seoi2 dou3 si4 ngo5 dei6 bit1 faat3 daat6 or "Feng Shui [dictates that] we will be lucky."
The vowelseo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping, whereas the eu represents both vowels in Yale.
The initialj represents /j/ in Jyutping whereas y is used instead in Yale.
The initial z represents /ts/ in Jyutping whereas j is used instead in Yale.
The initial c represents /tsʰ/ in Jyutping whereas ch is used instead in Yale.
In Jyutping, if no consonant precedes the vowel yu, then the initial j is appended before the vowel. In Yale, the corresponding initial y is never appended before yu under any circumstances.
Jyutping defines five finals not in Yale: a/ɐ/, eu/ɛːu/, em/ɛːm/, ep/ɛːp/, oet /œːt/. These finals are used in colloquial Cantonese words, such as deu6 (掉), lem2 (舐), and gep6 (夾).
To represent tones, only tone numbers are used in Jyutping whereas Yale traditionally uses tone marks together with the letter h (though tone numbers can be used in Yale as well).
Comparison with ILE romanisation
Jyutping and ILE romanisation represent Cantonese pronunciations with the same letters in:
The initials: b, p, m, f, d, t, n, l, g, k, ng, h, s, gw, kw, j, w.
The coda: i (except for its use in the coda/y/ in Jyutping; see below), u, m, n, ng, p, t, k.
But they have some differences:
The voweloe represents both /ɵ/ and /œː/ in ILE whereas eo and oe represent /ɵ/ and /œː/ respectively in Jyutping.
The vowel y represents /y/ in ILE whereas both yu (used in the nucleus) and i (used in the coda of the final -eoi) are used in Jyutping.
The initial dz represents /ts/ in ILE whereas z is used instead in Jyutping.
The initial ts represents /tsʰ/ in ILE whereas c is used instead in Jyutping.
To represent tones, the numbers 1 to 9 are usually used in ILE, although the use of 1, 3, 6 to replace 7, 8, 9 for the checked tones is acceptable. However, only the numbers 1 to 6 are used in Jyutping.
The Jyutping method (Chinese: 粵拼輸入法) refers to a family of input methods based on the Jyutping romanization system.
The Jyutping method allows a user to input Chinese characters by entering the Jyutping romanization of a Chinese character (with or without tone, depending on the system) and then presenting the user with a list of possible characters with that pronunciation.
^Kataoka, Shin; Lee, Cream (2008). "A System without a System: Cantonese Romanization Used in Hong Kong Place and Personal Names". Hong Kong Journal of Applied Linguistics: 94–98.
