CantoneseIPAOperator — IPA for Cantonese¶

cjklib.reading.operator.CantoneseIPAOperator is an experimental implementation of a transcription of Cantonese into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

Features:

Tones can be marked either with tone numbers (1-6), tone contour numbers (e.g. 55), IPA tone bar characters or IPA diacritics,
choice between high level and high falling tone for number marks,
flexible set of tones,
support for stop tones,
handling of variable vowel length for tone contours of stop tone syllables and
splitting of syllables into onset and rhyme.

Specifics¶

CantonteseIPAOperator does not supply the same closed set of syllables as other ReadingOperators as IPA provides different ways to represent pronunciation. Because of that a user defined IPA syllable will not easily map to another transcription system and thus only basic support is provided for this direction.

This operator supplies an additional method getOnsetRhyme() which allows breaking down syllables into their onset and rhyme.

Tones¶

Tones in IPA can be expressed using different schemes. The following schemes are implemented here:

Numbers, tone numbers for the six-tone scheme,
ChaoDigits, numbers displaying the levels of tone contours, e.g. 55 for the high level tone,
IPAToneBar, IPA modifying tone bar characters, e.g. ɛw˥˥,
None, no support for tone marks

Implementational details¶

The operator comes with three different set of tones to accommodate the user but at the same time handle all different tone types. This setting is controlled by option 'stopTones', where 'none' will force the set of 7 basic tones, 'general' will add the three stop tones found in STOP_TONES, and 'explicit' will add one stop tone for each possible vowel length i.e. short and long, making up the maximum count of 13. Internally the set with explicit stop tones is used.

Sources¶

Robert S. Bauer, Paul K. Benedikt: Modern Cantonese Phonology

(摩登廣州話語音學). Walter de Gruyter, 1997, ISBN 3-11-014893-5.
Robert S. Bauer: Hong Kong Cantonese Tone Contours. In: Studies in

Cantonese Linguistics. Linguistic Society of Hong Kong, 1998, ISBN 962-7578-04-5.