Cantonese Characters Disambiguated

write them right

Modern Cantonese still preserves many traits of Middle Chinese in terms of both pronunciation and wording. It is therefore common that certain characters/words used in colloquial Cantonese are in fact derived from more ancient forms of Chinese and are unfamiliar to native Chinese (including Cantonese) speakers. As a result, it has almost become a norm that Cantonese youths do not know how to write “Cantonese characters.” Many often resort to using homophones or adding the ‘mouth (口)’ radical to accustomed characters—English-like alphabetical spelling are also used sometimes. (Frankly speaking, Flying was also one of those guilty of ‘contaminating’ Cantonese. *ashamed*)

The following list shows some of the commonly misused characters in Cantonese. I’m also trying to include some hints on how one can input these characters with a computer. While the input methods referred to below may be implemented differently in different pieces of software, they should be usable in any reasonably up-to-date systems.

A Corpus of Difficult Cantonese Characters

• 
• aa
• a
• e
• o
• u
•  
• b
• p
• m
• f
• d
• t
• n
• l
• g
• k
• gw
• kw
• ng
• h
• z
• c
• s
• w
• j

References:

• Chinese Character Database: With Word-formations, Phonologically Disambiguated According to the Cantonese Dialect. Research Centre for Humanities Computing, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
• A Chinese Talking Syllabary of the Cantonese Dialect: An Electronic Repository. Cantonese Electronic Dictionary Team, Research Centre for Humanities Computing, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
• 《汉典》，ZDIC.NET 【汉典】，2006年8月第二次改版。
• 《广州音字典：修订版（普通话对照）》，饶秉才编，广东人民出版社，2003年9月，ISBN-13：978-7-218-00050-3。
• 《实用广州音字典（同音字并列·普通话对照）》，苏翰翀编著，中山大学出版社，1994年1月，ISBN-10：7-306-00670-3/H.35。
• 《最新现代汉语大词典》，世界书局（私人）有限公司，1995年第10版，ISBN-10：9971-3-0035-4。
• 粤语固有词汇与汉语北方话词汇对照，维基百科，2009年1月。