{"id":1026,"date":"2007-12-11T22:07:21","date_gmt":"2007-12-11T14:07:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/english-chinese-characters-for-cantonese-number-1\/"},"modified":"2018-09-03T16:56:14","modified_gmt":"2018-09-03T08:56:14","slug":"english-chinese-characters-for-cantonese-number-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2007\/english-chinese-characters-for-cantonese-number-1\/","title":{"rendered":"English + Chinese characters for Cantonese: Number 1!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AndyJoel of Danwei has posted about an interesting calligraphy scroll presented to Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau. <\/p>\n

\n

The characters read “You Are No. 1!” <\/p>\n

That’s not a translation: the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters 腰呀冧吧温! (”yiu a nam ba wan!”) approximates the English sentence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I just love stuff like this. <\/p>\n

Read in Mandarin this is just gibberish, especially the character 冧<\/span>.<\/p>\n

Read the whole post<\/a> for details. <\/p>\n

The technique also recalls the cover of Visible Speech<\/em>, by John DeFrancis<\/a>, which renders part of the Gettysburg Address phonetically in various scripts, some more closely than others (see the bottom line for Chinese characters with Mandarin pronunciations):
\n\"'four<\/a><\/p>\n

source: If you can read this, you’re Number One!, Danwei, December 6, 2007<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Joel of Danwei has posted about an interesting calligraphy scroll presented to Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau. The characters read “You Are No. 1!” That’s not a translation: the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters 腰呀冧吧温! (”yiu a nam ba wan!”) … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,12,15,8,28,55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cantonese","category-chinese","category-chinese-characters","category-hong-kong","category-languages","category-literacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1026"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8023,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1026\/revisions\/8023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}