我對香港語言學會粵語拼音的看法, 是即使學會拼音成為了官方粵語拼音, 也不應該作為transcription(中譯“音譯”).
My stance on the LSHK Jyutping Cantonese Romanization is that, even if it has gained official status as the standard Cantonese Romanization, it should not be used for transcription purposes.
Jyutping itself is meant to be a tool for teaching proper Cantonese Romanization. Just about as much as a tool zhuyin is. It aims to be “easily typed” with its use of numbers and its lack of diacritics. The assignment of the Penkyamp tones into Jyutping is just a terrible idea, since the way Penkyamp uses the diacritics pays no respect to how the diacritics are used. The umlaut and the tilde should not be used as tone markers unless either the tone name or the pitch/contour resembles the shape of the respective diacritics.
Jyutping itself may be considered as phonetic symbols similar to the pronunciation respelling conventions used in some dictionaries. It generally has a one-to-one correspondence between digraphs/letters and sounds, like how “o͝o” is used to represent /ʊ/ in Eng Pr, etc. The initials and vowels are officially never capitalized, further proving my point.
The numbers make it already ill-suited for transcription purposes. It would be awkward to write in an essay “The wong4 sek3 ling4 Romanization is first seen in his book jyut6 jam1 wan5 wui6, published in 1941”, whereas Pinyin does a better job at it: “Qín Shǐ Huáng was the King of the state of Qin.” Despite its many inconsistencies, Pinyin has its rules on segmentation, thus words like “Beijing” can be formed, whereas LSHK leaves us with “bak1 ging1”, or at most the unofficial convention of “Bakging”.
Jyutping also requires people to learn it rather thoroughly before one can approximate its intended pronunciations, even if we ignore all the tones, particularly its use of the “z”, “c” and “j” consonants. LSHK is not like the Japanese Hepburn Romanization, which is intuitive, and anyone can pronounce the Hepburn Romanization close to the intended pronunciation unless they pronounce it as if it were English (like pronouncing /ˈmæŋgə/). Should LSHK become an official Romanization used for transcription purposes, we would see placenames and people’s names as things like “Zaakjin” when the intended pronunciation is /tsak˨ jin˩/. Surely tourists and just general people should not have to bother with learning the LSHK Romanization just to pronounce the names of people and perhaps places in Hong Kong properly when referring to them. Especially in history lessons and the news, etc. The only way it would work would be if LSHK was read by a speaker of a European language that pronounces <z>, <c> and <j> as /z/ (which could get misheard by Cantonese speakers as [s] or [ts]) or /ts/, /ts/ and /j/ respectively. But then, those languages would not have a large difference between <z> and <c>, and would not aspirate on the voiceless stops, thus appearing to them as making no sense. Zsolt even calls them “horrible”.
In conclusion, I think that the LSHK Cantonese Romanization, because of its use of <z>, <c> and <j>, which has gained disproval by various Chinese teachers, should only be used as a tool for teaching proper pronunciation, and should not be used alone as transcribed words on T-shirts or for placenames, vocabulary (like saying “jiangshi is pronounced goengsi in Cantonese”) or human names. I would recommend either Eitel, Ball, Yale (but without the <h>) or my Romanization that is specifically designed for both transcription and proper pronunciation teaching purposes. However, my Romanization is not recognized yet, and LSHK remains to be relatively the best Romanization we have, as it distinguishes “oe” from “eo”, which are regarded to be different phonemes by some, is compatible with /ɛu/, a sound disrespected by most people who develop Cantonese Romanizations despite being every bit Cantonese, is intuitive with its use of “yu” (when compared with the “y” of the EDB Romanization) and is consistent with its representation of /a/ (the inconsistent representation of the sound in Yale caused confusion among Cantonese learners, as seen in Sheik’s Cantonese forums).
