Making Syllables

Now that we have the Vowels and the Consonants, we now need to combine them up and form syllables. In general, each syllable can be mapped to a 漢字(hon3 zi6)(Chinese character)¹. Each syllable is made up of:

• A combination of Initial and Final, made of vowels and consonants.
• A tone (the number tagging at the end).

Initial and Final

What is an Initial and a Final?

The Initial is the consonant sound at the beginning of a syllable, whereas the Final is a combination of a vowel and either a vowel or consonant. The Jyutping group website has a big chart of all the Finals in Cantonese if you’re interested.

As an example let’s have a look at the two syllables I’ve had just now:

• hon3 — the Initial would be the consonant h, the Final would be the vowel-consonant combo on, and the tone is 3.
• zi6 — the Initial here is z, the Final is just the vowel i, and the tone is 6.

There are in total 7 possible combinations that make up a syllable:

Type	Pattern	Example
Vowel on its own	V	鴉(aa1) - crow
Nasal consonant on its own	C	五(ng5) - five 唔(m4) - not
Vowel + final consonant	V + C	屋(uk1) - house 暗(am3) - dark
Vowel + either i or u (diphthong)	V + V	愛(oi3) - love 鷗(au1) - seagull
Initial + vowel	C + V	車(ce1) - car 書(syu1) - book
Initial + vowel + diphthong	C + V + V	好(hou2) - good 四(sei3) - four
Initial + vowel + consonant	C + V + C	心(sam1) - heart 雪(syut3) - snow

Interesting point on putting the n sound as the initial: the trend nowadays with the younger generation is to shift this sound from a nasal n sound to a lazier l sound.

Just a word of warning on the finals. There are 6 finals where the leading vowel (the one in front) changes from a long vowel to a short one. (We’re not going to expect to see a and eo on this list because these are short vowels already.) The ones are: ei, ou, ing, ung, ik, uk.

Tones

Tones are what gives Cantonese a sing-song like quality, which most Western languages (including English) don’t have. Each syllable has a tone that goes with it, and changing the tone along is enough to change the meaning altogether:

詩歌(si1 go1) - poem; 屎歌(si2 go1) - song of poop.

There are 6 tones in Cantonese, spanning across 5 pitches. The following graph from the interweb shows you those tones, and how the pitches change in each of the tones:

I’ve also found a couple of useful phrase to practise the tones (besides the one with all the si variation in the pic) from the Cantonese for Everyone book:

• 三點半嚟我到( saam1 dim2 bun3 lei4 ngo5 dou6)
  Come to my place at half past three.
• 一碗細牛腩麵( jat1 wun2 sai3 ngau4 naam5 min6)
  One small bowl of noodles with beef brisket.

Footnotes

1. Exceptions apply (of course…). Perhaps the a well known example of one is hea(he3) - it’s an exception not in the sense that it couldn’t be written down as a 漢字 character but rather there isn’t a consensus as to which character is correct. Depending on which source you’ve gone with it can be 棄 or 迤, or it could be something else completely different! ↩