Romanization Writing System - Gene M Chin

In this blog, I won’t go over the constants and vowels of Toisanese in depth. If you already have a background in learning Cantonese or English, you would probably pick this up easily. Furthermore, Toisanese word creation, like the Cantonese and Mandarin language, is split between beginning and ending sounds. Gene M. Chin uses the sophisticated term, phonemes, which are the smallest linguistic units of a word. A Toisanese word may not necessarily have an initial phoneme or a beginning sound, but must have a final phoneme or a final sound.

For example, the Toisanese word, ang1, which means, “to wait” does not have an initial phoneme since “ang” is already a final phoneme (as seen on the chart found on the Siyi Genalogy website below).

Please review the following sections of the Siyi Genealogy website where we will use the Gene M Chin Romanization created by Gene M. Chin:

Initial Phonemes

Final Phonemes

Table of Possible Combinations of Initial and Final Phonemes

While I will not go over these topics in depth, I will, however, write some interesting notes on these topics.

Initial Phonemes – Toisan Descendant Notes:

Please note that the pronunciations are basically the same as Jyutping Cantonese with the exception of J, V, and Y.

V, J and Y – are pronounced using the American V, J, and Y sounds.

In Toisanese, the letter X is pronounced differently. In the pinyin Mandarin system, the letter X is pronounced “Ssi” and the letter X is nonexistent in the jyutping Cantonese Romanization system. In Toisanese, however, the X pronunciation sounds like “thl.” The tip or the front of the tongue touches the roof of the mouth behind the two front teeth to produce the “thl” sound. The “thl” sound sounds more like a “theul” sound, only faster.  The thl sound will be easy to make as long as you keep the tip or front of your tongue in place, keeping the sides of your tongue free.

The other consonant letters are pronounced the American English way.

Please note the “ng” sound is the same as the Cantonese jyutping “ng” sound. It sounds like the ending in the English word, “ring.” I would explain the “ng” sound as placing the back of your tongue at the back roof of your mouth to produce the “ng” sound.

Final Phonemes – Toisan Descendant Notes:

 Basic vowel ending sounds based on American English pronunciation:

A  as in “ahh!”

Eh  as in “ehh”

Note: In notation, there are no Toisanese words that are solely spelled with “e,” but there are words that are spelled, “eh” even though “e” and “eh” are the same sounds. Always use “eh” when writing the sound.

I as in “ee” (rhymes with the English word, me)

O as in “aw”

U as in “oo” (rhymes with the English word, food)

Vowel Combinations / Diphthongs:

Now that we learned the basic vowel sounds. How do you think these vowel combinations / diphthongs will sound?

ai

ao

ei

eo

oi

iu

ui

ANSWER:

ai as in “eye” or ah + ee

ao as in “ow” or ah + aw

ei as in “the pronunciation of the American letter, ‘A.’” or eh + ee

eo – Sadly, there are no English words I can think of as an example, but it does rhyme with the term, “AWOL” to mean “absent without official leave” or eh + aw

oi as in “oy” (rhymes with the English word, boy) or aw + ee

iu as in “ew” or ee + oo

ui as in “ooey” (rhymes with the English word, gooey) or oo + ee

Special Toisanese/Cantonese Ending Consonant Sounds:

It’s good to note that the K, P, or T ending sounds are not fully spoken just like the endings are not fully spoken in the Cantonese language. Koreans would call the unstressed sounds “unaspirated” sounds such as G, B, D as opposed to “aspirated” sounds such as K, P, or T.

If we actually approach the topic from a Korean perspective, it might be more understandable though this rule only applies for the Cantonese and Toisanese languages. The aspirated K ending sound would become an unaspirated G sound. The P aspirated ending sound would become an unaspirated B sound and the T aspirated ending sound would become a D unaspirated sound.

K à G

P à B

T à D

Do these sounds sound familiar? All you need to do is make a mental note of the change, but this change only pertains to ending sounds or final phonemes. Any word that begins with a K, P, or T would be pronounced as it is normally pronounced in the American alphabet.

For example: nek is pronounced, “neg.”

In English terms, the word, nek, is not pronounced “neck,” but “neg” as in “negative.” Remember to keep all words short with one syllable. Do not add in another syllable like “neck-uh” or “neg-ah.”

Okay, let’s practice more:

Pronounce “dip.”

Remember, the “I” sound is more like the “ee” sound.

ANSWER: dib. Pronounced: deeb. Not deeb-uh.

And lastly:

Pronounce “pot.”

Remember the “o” sound is more like the “aw” sound like in the word, “office.”

ANSWER: pod. Pronounced: pawd. Not pawd-uh or bad or pahd.

Because the letter “P” is at the beginning, “P” is pronounced with a regular “P” sound instead of a “B” sound. The pronunciation, bod (pronounced, bahd), would be wrong.

I will probably be focusing more on pronunciation when we learn actual vocabulary, but the Siyi Generalogy is still a great guide for reference.

As for writing the actual Chinese characters, I read that not all Toisanese characters have a Chinese character equivalent. I will have to look more into that in the future. To be honest, I would like to approach Toisanese education more from a Cantonese and American English perspective so I will try to include traditional Chinese characters and English with my translations.

From this point on, my posts will become more random since we have covered the overall “structural part” of Toisanese besides grammar though I will not be focusing on it at the moment. I believe Toisanese grammar follows Chinese grammar, but if there are any exceptions, I’ll will write about it.

I hope you enjoyed the mini Toisanese introduction so far. Hopefully, my notes helped you understand Toisanese a little better. It certainly helped me so far.