Initially my blog was focused on technical IT subject. Overtime I have wrote less about that and more on general topics like travel. Today I will return to a technical topic about the Jyutping(粵拼) Cantonese romanization system.

I start off with the quest to learn and master a Chinese input method. Years ago I started with the Cangjie (倉頡) system. I never get much beyond basics because it is a difficult system to learn, let alone to master. Then I looked at pronunciation based system. I am glad to find out Cantonese based system is readily available. Out of the multiple romanization system, people seems to have gravitated toward the Jyutping system by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

So the next step is to get familiar with the Jyutping system, which is not trivial for me because I am weak in phonetics. It will be very useful if there is a service to annotate a piece of Chinese text with the pronunciation under each character. Unfortunately I can find no such software besides some dictionary that does it character by character. Instead I have decided to write one myself, as a naïve translation should not be difficult to write.

Now all I need is a table of all Chinese characters and its Jyutping, i.e. the Jyutping specification. I have spent days searching the internet and come out empty handed. Linguistic Society of Hong Kong themselves provides little more than a general description. It is a shame even some links to its description are broken.

The good news is I have finally found it from the Unicode Han Database, a place I have crossed many time but have not realized they have compiled the most comprehensive data on Chinese characters, including Jyutping and even Cangjie code. With the database here I am ready for business!

(2010-02-17 Thanks Helena for the heads up. The Unihan database format has since changed. The new download link is Unihan.zip. Some general description such as Unicode NamesList File Format are also available. )

2007.11.29 [jyutping, chinese, language] - comments