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Cantonese Romanization The majority of the Chinese words and names used in these pages are from the Cantonese language. Representing Cantonese in alphabetic form is an intrinsically challenging problem, and none of the current systems is ideal. In this website, the Yale system developed by Parker Huang and Gerald Kok is adopted. This is the system used in Huang and Kok's Speak Cantonese courses and other materials produced at Yale University, and in Tong and James' Colloquial Cantonese (1994). In Hong Kong, it is used at the University of Hongkong and by the New Asia-Yale-in-China Chinese Language Centre of the Chinese University in its courses and for its new Cantonese-English and English-Cantonese dictionaries. The notation of tones is relatively economical and iconic: rising and failing tones are shown by rising and failing accents. The Yale system uses no tonal indication for the mid level tone, which is appropriate since this is the most neutral of the tones. The one arbitrary feature of tonal marking in the Yale system is the 'h' inserted after the vowel/diphthong for low-register tones. The initial tone (high, middle, low) is modified by an inflection (level, rising, falling). The Cantonese tones in the Yale system:
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