Vermillion Ancient Strength

When Cantonese doesn't have a native equivalent for an English word, it can adopt the word in one of two ways: create a new compound word that captures the intended meaning, or transliterate using existing Cantonese words that "sound like" the syllables in the foreign word.

While compound words are a reasonable and functional solution, transliteration poses difficulties. The main problem is that in and of themselves, Chinese characters do not represent sound. In written form they are simply words with various definitions that are pronounced using tones that serve only to identify them.

The other problem is that in Cantonese, certain sounds don't exist; transliteration can only approximate English, and while it may work in Cantonese, it does not work as well in other Chinese dialects.

Take the transliteration of chocolate and strawberry, for example. In Cantonese they are pronounced jyuh gu lihk (朱古力) and sih do be leih (士多啤梨). The rough English phonetic equivalents might be written as joo goo lick and see daw beh ("e" as in "bed") lay.

Transliteration creates another headache in that cobbled words are gibberish; one must ignore the literal meaning and go only by sound and context (such as on a menu), which is why learning to read Chinese is an extreme challenge for those educated under the Roman alphabet.

The traditional Chinese words use to transliterate chocolate literally mean vermillion, ancient, and strength; the words for strawberry mean scholar, many, ( 啤 has no meaning on its own but is used in transliteration), and pear.

When compound words or transliterations don't exist, Hong Kongers often insert English into spoken Cantonese. Those who've studied abroad tend to mix in more English, forming a sub-dialect that properly could be called Chinglish (not to be confused with poorly translated English-language signs erroneously labelled as Chinglish).

This is not to say that English transliteration is perfect, not by a long shot. Hong Kong (香港) is a glaring example. In Cantonese it is pronounced heung gong (fragrant harbour), but English has no vowel sound for "eu" (the closest approximate sound is the "ea" in learn), and replacing a "g" sound with a "k" seems rather stupid. But I can live with it, given the persistent mangling of other Cantonese words; thus Hong Kong is a far better choice than say, Hearn Gong.

So while transliteration isn't always ideal, at least constructions like jyuh gu lihk and sih do be leih are easy to remember.

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