5 ms·

Something's not clear here to me, how does this handle words with multiple pronounciations using a font alone?

by kelvie 3y ago

ghayes 3y ago
As far as I know, Mandarin doesn't have multiple pronunciations for the same character-- does Cantonese? Aside of that, you could use ligatures for that, couldn't you?
- akavi 3y ago
  Mandarin absolutely does: * 行: xíng or háng * 的: de or dì * 长: cháng or zhǎng (plus I'm sure many more that I can't think of just right now)
  - gs17 3y ago
    了 as le or liǎo, too.
  - hangonhn 3y ago
    Did it get more numerous with the adoption of simplified characters?
    - akavi 3y ago
      I'm not sure, but I believe that most, if not all, mergers from simplification were homophones.
    - hawflakes 3y ago
      Yes, it did if you're not a mandarin speaker. The simplification process was biased towards Mandarin and there are some words that were merged that have different pronunciations in Cantonese but not in Mandarin.
- joak 3y ago
  In Mandarin there are actually different pronunciation depending on context. Example 觉得 juede, to think 睡觉 shuijiao, to sleep Here the same character is pronounced jue or jiao depending on context
- gnownelag 3y ago
  Both Mandarin and Cantonese actually have multiple pronunciations for the same character. Here is an example in both: - 说服/說服 Mandarin: shuì fú Cantonese: seoi3 fuk6 - 说话/說話 Mandarin: shuō huà Cantonese: syut3 waa6
- Umofomia 3y ago
  Mandarin definitely has many characters with multiple pronunciations. One large class come from literary vs. colloquial reading differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readings_of_Chinese_characters#Mandarin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readin... Another large class class comes from vestiges of derivational morphology in Old Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph#In_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph#In_Chinese For instance, the character 度 in modern Mandarin can be pronounced dù (when used as a noun) or duó (when used as a verb), both of which derived from Old Chinese /daːɡs/ and /daːɡ/, respectively. With Simplified Chinese characters, some of them come from the merger of originally different words that had similar, but not exactly the same pronunciations. For instance, both 髮 (fà) and 發 (fā) were merged into 发.
  - ackfoobar 3y ago
    For the example you give, in Cantonese they're dou6 and dok6, respectively. The 3/6 tones in Cantonese and ˋ (4th, falling tone) in Mandarin are the "departing" tone, which comes from the departing tone in Middle Chinese, which I believe comes from the -s ending in Old Chinese.
- inkyoto 3y ago
  Both do. A single, isolated Chinese character may have multiple unrelated meanings with some of them having an entirely unrelated pronunciation. It is, in fact, ubiquitous. The idea is that each honzi has exactly one meaning is a misconception. With respect to ligatures, if by that you mean the length of the same word across different Sinitic languages, that depends on the specific language and its phonology. Mandarin, for instance, has lost a large number of finals over the course of its evolution which has resulted in words generally being longer and requiring extra syllables to resolve the phonetic ambiguity. The Sinitic languages that have retained more finals (and sounds in general) tend to have more of shorter words. Cantonese is one of them albeit not the only one.
pleasedontsell 3y ago
Maybe it uses font ligatures to change based on the surrounding characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)
- jkwchui 3y ago
  You are correct!
rahimnathwani 3y ago
Perhaps they use the same technology as ligatures? There could be a glyph for the standalone character, but also special glyphs for certain combos? The page says they do handle variations: Pronunciation in the Cantonese Font adapts to the context. Based on what comes before or after, the Jyutping romanization changes to the right one. The magic behind this is a careful curation from 100,000 contexts where the pronunciation differs from the standalone character.
- jeffparsons 3y ago
  I've seen ligatures (or whatever the underlying feature is in font formats) used for some wild stuff, but this takes the cake. They're effectively encoding a small amount of natural language processing in a font. Setting aside for a minute the question of whether you _should_, I wonder how far you can take this? I.e. what limits are there on how much context you can take into account, etc.?
  - TylerE 3y ago
    You'd like https://www.notationcentral.com/product/musglyphs/ https://www.notationcentral.com/product/musglyphs/
  - philsnow 3y ago
    I think it also uses ligatures to render words from the "phrasebook", where you can take a word like "friend" and change the font from Times to this font, and it renders it as 朋友. Beautiful.
  - jkwchui 3y ago
    (Font author) This is all off the beaten path, so I suspect the answer is no one knows. Font tables have a limit of 65k characters, but this ceiling can be busted in whacky ways using multiple lookups, useExtension... Practically, font building tools / operations crash (mysteriously), stalls (mysteriously), or slows to a crawl (indistinguishable from stalling), and the Cantonese Font about pushes the limit.
- jkwchui 3y ago
jamesdutc 3y ago
I am not a Cantonese speaker; however, in Mandarin, fonts with phonetic guidance are very common. e.g., Hann-Tzong Wang's (王漢宗) free font collection[1] includes two typefaces with phonetic pronunciation guidance. These are wp{0..3}10-05.ttf and wp{0..3}10-08.ttf [2] As you can see from the filenames, there are actually four different font files for each of these two typefaces. The font files numbered {1..3} are for 「破音字」, characters with alternate pronunciation. When a user types a word like 「給予」 (ㄐ一ˇㄩˇ/jǐ yǔ) for which there is an alternate, less-common pronunciation (ㄐ一ˇ/jǐ instead of ㄍㄟˇ/gěi for 給) they simply change the font for just the affected character to the variant with the correct pronunciation. In the case of this Cantonese Font, the authors distribute a single .ttf (alongside a “phrasebook” .ttf whose purpose is not clear to me) and indicate in the Roadmap section of the website that ligature support must be enabled. If alternate pronunciations are common in Cantonese, then I suspect that they must use some ligature-based method. I would have to imagine there must be cases where this could be ambiguous, but I don't know how you would resolve those. (In practice, just swapping the font on a single character works fairly well.) [1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/wangfonts/ https://code.google.com/archive/p/wangfonts/ [2] https://dywang.csie.cyut.edu.tw/dywang/download/pdf/sample-ooo.pdf https://dywang.csie.cyut.edu.tw/dywang/download/pdf/sample-o...
- er4hn 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing this. When I saw the link, I wanted to see if there was something similar for Mandarin. Looking at the PDF sample I don't see anything around how to pronounce the characters, i.e. there's nothing along the top or bottom that looks like pinyin with tonal markers. Am I missing something?
  - ywnico 3y ago
    The fonts at the bottom of the first page (wp010-05.ttf) and the top of the second page (wp[123]10-05.ttf etc.) have zhuyin (aka bopomofo) phonetic symbols [1] to the right of each character. These are common in Taiwan, whereas pinyin is used in the mainland. jamesdutc also used them in the comment above; e.g., ㄐ一ˇㄩˇ = jǐ yǔ. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
  - 3y ago

Something's not clear here to me, how does this handle words with multiple pronounciations using a font alone?

by kelvie 3y ago

Something's not clear here to me, how does this handle words with multiple pronounciations using a font alone?

As far as I know, Mandarin doesn't have multiple pronunciations for the same character-- does Cantonese? Aside of that, you could use ligatures for that, couldn't you?

akavi 3y ago
Mandarin absolutely does: * 行: xíng or háng * 的: de or dì * 长: cháng or zhǎng (plus I'm sure many more that I can't think of just right now)
- gs17 3y ago
  了 as le or liǎo, too.
- hangonhn 3y ago
  Did it get more numerous with the adoption of simplified characters?
  - akavi 3y ago
    I'm not sure, but I believe that most, if not all, mergers from simplification were homophones.
  - hawflakes 3y ago
    Yes, it did if you're not a mandarin speaker. The simplification process was biased towards Mandarin and there are some words that were merged that have different pronunciations in Cantonese but not in Mandarin.
joak 3y ago
In Mandarin there are actually different pronunciation depending on context. Example 觉得 juede, to think 睡觉 shuijiao, to sleep Here the same character is pronounced jue or jiao depending on context
gnownelag 3y ago
Both Mandarin and Cantonese actually have multiple pronunciations for the same character. Here is an example in both: - 说服/說服 Mandarin: shuì fú Cantonese: seoi3 fuk6 - 说话/說話 Mandarin: shuō huà Cantonese: syut3 waa6
Umofomia 3y ago
Mandarin definitely has many characters with multiple pronunciations. One large class come from literary vs. colloquial reading differences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readings_of_Chinese_characters#Mandarin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_and_colloquial_readin... Another large class class comes from vestiges of derivational morphology in Old Chinese: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph#In_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homograph#In_Chinese For instance, the character 度 in modern Mandarin can be pronounced dù (when used as a noun) or duó (when used as a verb), both of which derived from Old Chinese /daːɡs/ and /daːɡ/, respectively. With Simplified Chinese characters, some of them come from the merger of originally different words that had similar, but not exactly the same pronunciations. For instance, both 髮 (fà) and 發 (fā) were merged into 发.
- ackfoobar 3y ago
  For the example you give, in Cantonese they're dou6 and dok6, respectively. The 3/6 tones in Cantonese and ˋ (4th, falling tone) in Mandarin are the "departing" tone, which comes from the departing tone in Middle Chinese, which I believe comes from the -s ending in Old Chinese.
inkyoto 3y ago
Both do. A single, isolated Chinese character may have multiple unrelated meanings with some of them having an entirely unrelated pronunciation. It is, in fact, ubiquitous. The idea is that each honzi has exactly one meaning is a misconception. With respect to ligatures, if by that you mean the length of the same word across different Sinitic languages, that depends on the specific language and its phonology. Mandarin, for instance, has lost a large number of finals over the course of its evolution which has resulted in words generally being longer and requiring extra syllables to resolve the phonetic ambiguity. The Sinitic languages that have retained more finals (and sounds in general) tend to have more of shorter words. Cantonese is one of them albeit not the only one.

pleasedontsell 3y ago

Maybe it uses font ligatures to change based on the surrounding characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ligature_(writing)

jkwchui 3y ago
You are correct!

rahimnathwani 3y ago

Perhaps they use the same technology as ligatures? There could be a glyph for the standalone character, but also special glyphs for certain combos? The page says they do handle variations: Pronunciation in the Cantonese Font adapts to the context. Based on what comes before or after, the Jyutping romanization changes to the right one. The magic behind this is a careful curation from 100,000 contexts where the pronunciation differs from the standalone character.

jeffparsons 3y ago
I've seen ligatures (or whatever the underlying feature is in font formats) used for some wild stuff, but this takes the cake. They're effectively encoding a small amount of natural language processing in a font. Setting aside for a minute the question of whether you _should_, I wonder how far you can take this? I.e. what limits are there on how much context you can take into account, etc.?
- TylerE 3y ago
  You'd like https://www.notationcentral.com/product/musglyphs/ https://www.notationcentral.com/product/musglyphs/
- philsnow 3y ago
  I think it also uses ligatures to render words from the "phrasebook", where you can take a word like "friend" and change the font from Times to this font, and it renders it as 朋友. Beautiful.
- jkwchui 3y ago
  (Font author) This is all off the beaten path, so I suspect the answer is no one knows. Font tables have a limit of 65k characters, but this ceiling can be busted in whacky ways using multiple lookups, useExtension... Practically, font building tools / operations crash (mysteriously), stalls (mysteriously), or slows to a crawl (indistinguishable from stalling), and the Cantonese Font about pushes the limit.
jkwchui 3y ago

jamesdutc 3y ago

I am not a Cantonese speaker; however, in Mandarin, fonts with phonetic guidance are very common. e.g., Hann-Tzong Wang's (王漢宗) free font collection[1] includes two typefaces with phonetic pronunciation guidance. These are wp{0..3}10-05.ttf and wp{0..3}10-08.ttf [2] As you can see from the filenames, there are actually four different font files for each of these two typefaces. The font files numbered {1..3} are for 「破音字」, characters with alternate pronunciation. When a user types a word like 「給予」 (ㄐ一ˇㄩˇ/jǐ yǔ) for which there is an alternate, less-common pronunciation (ㄐ一ˇ/jǐ instead of ㄍㄟˇ/gěi for 給) they simply change the font for just the affected character to the variant with the correct pronunciation. In the case of this Cantonese Font, the authors distribute a single .ttf (alongside a “phrasebook” .ttf whose purpose is not clear to me) and indicate in the Roadmap section of the website that ligature support must be enabled. If alternate pronunciations are common in Cantonese, then I suspect that they must use some ligature-based method. I would have to imagine there must be cases where this could be ambiguous, but I don't know how you would resolve those. (In practice, just swapping the font on a single character works fairly well.) [1] https://code.google.com/archive/p/wangfonts/ https://code.google.com/archive/p/wangfonts/ [2] https://dywang.csie.cyut.edu.tw/dywang/download/pdf/sample-ooo.pdf https://dywang.csie.cyut.edu.tw/dywang/download/pdf/sample-o...

er4hn 3y ago
Thanks for sharing this. When I saw the link, I wanted to see if there was something similar for Mandarin. Looking at the PDF sample I don't see anything around how to pronounce the characters, i.e. there's nothing along the top or bottom that looks like pinyin with tonal markers. Am I missing something?
- ywnico 3y ago
  The fonts at the bottom of the first page (wp010-05.ttf) and the top of the second page (wp[123]10-05.ttf etc.) have zhuyin (aka bopomofo) phonetic symbols [1] to the right of each character. These are common in Taiwan, whereas pinyin is used in the mainland. jamesdutc also used them in the comment above; e.g., ㄐ一ˇㄩˇ = jǐ yǔ. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
- 3y ago