Introduction
From the 80s in the last Century, there has been some movements promoting “proper Cantonese pronunciation,” or PCP in short, backed by various scholars and media. The idea of “proper pronunciation” comes from pronunciations that are commonly heard in daily usage which are deemed as either wrong or unclear by archaic standards. The wrong pronunciations often refers to mispronunciation such as pronouncing 爍 (soek3) as 礫 (lik1), which largely associates with characters with similar structure. While for unclear pronunciations it refers to “lazy pronunciation“ (懶音) which people mistakenly use or fail to pronounce correctly due to the speed of speech.
Prof. Richard Ho, being the most iconic and enthusiastic campaigner, suggested that we should refer to Guangyun (《廣韻》). For example芥蘭should be pronounced as gaai3 laan4 instead of gaai3 laan2, which is a more common practice among native Cantonese users. Beside academic areas, this standard was also adopted by social media companies such as TVB and ATV in 2000s. Numerous programmes were made and aired promoting PCP by identifying “wrong” pronunciations among the streets of Hong Kong.
Of course, promoting the common pronunciations as “wrong” ones would ensure many controversies and chaos. Since the standard relies only on the outdated Guangyun, many pronunciations in modern Hong Kong did stay the same in the way of how the characters should be pronounced hundreds of year ago. This induced considerable amount of confusion in identifying correct pronunciations for the mass public.
As an inevitable result, the hasted promotion ignited heated debates around PCP. At the former public examination systems (AL/CE), this issue also raises the concern of proper Cantonese pron...
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...has not been pay much attention to, rather, grammar, formal wordings and document templates are being taught more. It manifested that the status of Cantonese language is low in schools education. Nevertheless, there are numerous Cantonese users in schools. Therefore, promoting through schools might be a sound method to boost up PCP, as well as its status in Hong Kong education.
The main concern about the promotion would be the support by the government. Since this scheme involves great amount of money and human resources, it is essential that the government would give a helping hand to this issue in order to obtain a remarkable outcome.
Reference:
http://grammar.about.com/od/il/g/Language-Standardization.htm
http://www.slideshare.net/adm-2012/language-standardization-how-and-why-15391739
http://online.savepropercantonese.com/article/hdpiid-409
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