點解要設計呢套羅馬字
Dím-gáai yiu cit-gai nî-tou lö-ma-zĩ?
Why design this romanization system?

Why romanization?

Why not Yũt-yủ zeng-zi (粵語正字; lit. "Cantonese proper characters")?

Yũt-yủ zengzi is a lie, both in the historical sense and the practical sense: it's a dishonest attempt of retrofitting the Kra-Dai roots of Cantonese onto fake, made-up and ultimately non-existent Sinitic history. This is why there's so many "proper characters" with the character 口 inside: they're simply transliteral because people couldn't find a character that has both a "proper Sinitic language history" and a historical pronunciation that's possible to evolve into the current pronunciation. These kind of attempts will only feed into the false narrative of Cantonese being a "dialect" of Chinese and will never properly serve the purpose of preserving our culture.

Why not Jyutping?

Jyutping uses numbers to denote tones, which is not very neat when used in long text; tones are vital to Cantonese but I certainly wouldn't want to write a number after every single character. I've seen people romanize Basurian languages with no tone denotation; I don't think this is the road Cantonese should take.

Why not Yale?

I designed the system (the 2022 version) exactly because I couldn't input macron easily as on smartphones; or else I would've just used Yale. (Maybe oneday I'll make a tool like Tajpi for Esperanto and this whole system would be deprecated; who knows?)

(Update 2023.12.6: We did! We made Keyboard Layout for Southeast Romanizations. We don't think our system would be rendered useless by this though.)

Why not Jyutcitzi?

If you don't know Jyutcitzi, it's an alternative system for Cantonese very similar to Hangul where simple Hanzi characters are used instead of new symbols.

I'm not saying that Jyutcitzi is an inherently bad idea, I'm just saying that its rationale is just as flimsy and the system itself leaves much to be desired.

Why the revision (for ver. 2022)?

After completing the 2022 version there were a few points that I don't like:

Why the revision (for ver. 2023)?

Why the revision (for New Yale)?

Wouldn't there be ambiguity if you don't use Chinese characters?

Well we don't "speak" Chinese characters per se (you don't speak a writing system anyway) but we never find it inconvenient; the Koreans ditched Chinese characters centuries ago and they haven't feel much inconvenience, do they?

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