Ed's Big Plans

Detour: I was just thinking today that there are three really odd Chinese characters that I wanted to show you. Each of these glyphs are mapped to both spoken Cantonese and Mandarin words but are not generally compatible with everyday speech. For instance, the second word listed below is replaced by the informal “ah(r)3″ sound that Cantonese speakers make at the end of sentences on occasion (varies with situation, personality).

• 嗎 0x55CE: Audible Question Mark “ma3″
• 了 0x4E86: Audible Exclamation Mark “lew5″
• 的 0×7684: Reverse of “of” in English “di(k)6″

The hex code is the position that each character occupies in the big giant unicode table of glyphs for Chinese characters– the integers correspond to relative intonations. These intonations are equally as important as vowel sounds. I really want to learn how to encode human pronunciations using International Phoenetic Alphabet (IPA), but that would be a project for a later day…

Update: In spoken Cantonese, the first word [from the above list] is often replaced by the sound “gwa3″, and the third word may be replaced by “gò3″.