Thread by @ewen201

I feel like doing a thread on #HK place names and the absolute treasure trove of cool historical snippets of 1800s #Cantonese that we can see in their romanizations bc not enough ppl talk abt this

also I miss Hong Kong a lot so this is an excuse to look at pics of HK :^)

1) Hung Hom (紅磡) and Om Yau (菴由) - what's with the "om"?

around the mid 19th century, -om in cantonese shifted to our modern day pronunciation /ɐm/, but the older pronunciation stuck around in the romanization

咁 was also pronounced like "gom" back in the day :^)

2) what's with the random sh's all over the place? (ie: 沙田 Shatin, 深水埗 Sham Shui Po, etc)

s/sh used to be distinct in canto, but merged at the end of the 1800s. for reference, s mostly corresponds with mandarin <x> or <s>, and sh with mandarin <sh> (Sha Tian, Shen Shui Bu)

2 (continued) but compare 西灣河 (Sai Wan Ho), 秀茂坪 (Sau Mau Ping), 掃管笏 (So Kwun Wat) and their equivalents in mando (xi wan he, xiu mao ping, sao guan hu)

3) sz/tz? what's with the Z?

the 19th century canto pronunciation of words like 獅 and 子 were v similar to the modern day mandarin pronunciation, and this apical vowel was romanized as <z> or <ze>

you still see it in 慈雲山 (Tsz Wan Shan) or names like 岑子杰 (Sham Tsz Kit)

4) ts/ch? what's the difference

canto used to have a distinction between ts/ch but like 2), it also merged in the late 1800s/early 1900s

compare 杏花邨 (Heng Fa Chuen) and 荃灣 (Tsuen Wan), or 齊安大廈 (Tsai On) and 柴灣 (Chai Wan) (diff vowel but that's besides the point LOL)

4 (continued) this doesn't hold for all examples tho (ie: 灣仔 (Wan Chai) vs. 九龍仔公園 (Kowloon Tsai Park)) - presumably the latter romanization was picked when 仔 had already merged to /tsɐi/ for most speakers

for ref, ts usually corresponds w/ mandarin <q> and ch w/ <ch>

5) why do we rarely see b, d, or g in these romanizations? why is 大埔 Tai Po, and why are 葵芳 (Kwai Fong) and 蘭桂坊 (Lan Kwai Fong) both written with kwai?

bc cantonese actually doesn't have b/d/g sounds (voiced consonants)!

5 (continued) the diff betw 拜 /pai/ and 派 /pʰai/ is actually a diff in sth called aspiration

older romanizations like Standard Romanization (what the HK gov uses as the basis for many place name romanizations) + Wade-Giles for mando were conscious of this aspiration difference

5 (continued) but for place names, this distinction in aspiration was scrapped, so you end up with cases where the same letter represents two different sounds, like Kwai Fong /kʰwɐi/ and Lan Kwai Fong /kwɐi/, or the two different ch's in Cheung Chau /tsʰœŋ tsɐu/

6) why is 記 Kee and 利安 Lee On?

1800s canto didn't have the -ei vowel yet! the vowel shifted in the late 1800s, so /ki/ became /kei/ and /li/ became /lei/. the words in 3) like 獅子 shifted away from that "sz tsz" pronunciation to /si tsi/ and filled in the gap

7) you can actually see this romanization in action in a lot of HK surnames as well !!!

- 沈 Shum, 蕭 Shiu (Siu also exists), 邵 Shiu (#2)
- 施 Sze (#3)
- 陳 Chan, 徐 Tsui, 鄭 Cheng, 謝 Tse (#4 and #5)
- 郭 Kwok, 關 Kwan, 鄧 Tang (#5)
- 李 Lee (#6)

8) not about sound change but u can also see other languages in HK place names

"Praya" comes from the Portuguese praia "beach" and in colonial HK, it referred to roads running parallel to the harbour (新興海傍街 San Hing Praya Street, 香港仔海傍道 Aberdeen Praya Road, etc)

8 (continued) there's also an area of 深水埗 where streets are named after places/trading cities in China: 南昌街 (Nam Cheong), 欽州街 (Yen Chow), 北河街 (Pei Ho), 桂林街 (Kweilin)

or Pratas St. (東沙島街), named after Pratas Island, from the Portuguese pratas "plates"

8 (continued) 黃埔 is written as Whampoa in English, French, and Danish transliterations, but it's pretty irregular. the HK port was named after a region in GZ now known as Pazhou (formerly Whampoa) Island, so the romanization is likely not influenced by HK's indigenous languages

8) (continued) this is pure conjecture, but part of me feels like it could also be an obscure Portuguese transliteration, given the historical Luso-Chinese interactions in that region? idk i might be completely wrong LOL

9) you can see a handful of road names using the Chinese Postal Romanization: Peking Rd (北京道), Nanking Rd (南京道), and Kiu Kiang St (九江街)

there's also Tonkin St. (東京街), which isn't Postal Romanization, but it's likely connected to the French exonym for Northern Vietnam