JCL Monograph Series NO.18 专著系列 18 卷 – 2002

Abstract 摘要
Among Asia’s four major Chinese speech communities of the mainland of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, Hong Kong distinguishes itself by being predominantly Cantonese speaking in both formal and informal social domains. Here children have traditionally learned to read the standard, complex Chinese characters with their Cantonese pronunciations. A related phenomenon has been the spontaneous development of a nonstandardized, unofficial, and informal written counterpart of spoken Cantonese, which has now become widely used in Hong Kong newspapers, public notices, comic books, novels, play scripts, advertisements, graffiti, etc. This two-part monograph introduces written Cantonese in its Hong Kong context, delineates the conventions on which it is based, describes the authors’ recently completed research project in which a computerized database on the transcription of Cantonese with Chinese characters was compiled, and identifies some of the problems associated with the computer-processing of Cantonese.

The unique contribution of the monograph is that it has systematically brought together in one volume 1,095 different Cantonese characters; classified them in three appendices according to their availability in computerized Chinese character sets; listed their computer access codes in the regular Big-5 system and the Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set; Romanized their Cantonese pronunciation (including variant forms); glossed them in English; illustrated their usage; and cited the sources from which the characters have been taken. In addition, for the reader’s ease of reference the three appendices of Cantonese characters have been merged into two lexicons: Lexicon 1 has alphabetized all the Cantonese characters by their Romanized pronunciations; and Lexicon 2 has listed all the Cantonese characters by the traditional numbers of their radicals and stroke counts.

在亚洲的四个使用中文的主要地区中，香港和台湾，中国大陆，新加坡不同之处，在于大部分人口的口语，无论在正式或非正式场合均采用广州话（粤语方言）。儿童上学也使用广州话学习标准繁体汉字的读音。由此产生的相关现象，是未经标准化，非官方，非正式的粤语书写形式自发发展，广泛见于香港报章，公众通告，漫画，小说，游戏文字，广告，涂鸦等场合。这本专辑共分为两部份，是二位作者刚完成的研究计划，旨在介绍香港这个环境中产生的粤语文字，描写其造字基础。这个研究已经将粤语用字储存在一个计算机数据库中，并且指岀在计算机处理粤语时，以汉字表达粤语的相关问题。

本专辑的独特优点，是系统地收集了1,095个不同的粤语用字，根据这些字在中文计算机字符集中的分布，分类成为三个附表，列岀这些字在大五码和香港增补字符集中的计算机编码，以粤语拼音表达粤语读音（和变体粤语读音），译成英语，举例阐明用法，并引证岀处。此外，为了方便读者能更容易在附表中找到这些粤语用字，三个附表合倂为两个字表：字表1按粤语拼音用英文字母序安排，而字表2则将这些用字根据传统的汉字部首和笔画排列。