虛韻
Tuesday, 7. June 2011
虛韻 is kind of interesting. 虛韻, in english, is the vowel of 虛, which can be represented differently in jyut-ping, ping-jam or pin-yin, if pronounced with mandarin.
The consonant of the syllable 虛 is represented by the letter h which sounds with the aspiration like hi, him, he, high, huge, hey.. etc. However, the vowel of 虛 can be represented in many ways such as eoi, oei, oey or eoy or with various many different systems or formats. So the syllable 虛 is pronouced like hoei, heoi or hoey etc.
The vowels o, e, y, i can be voiced individually. oe is more like a diphthong of o and e and y is more like yu and i is like ee in english. Now mixing the oey and oei seem very similar as the ending yu and ee(i) after oe or eo is pretty much the same.That is oey=oe+y or eoy=eo+y oei=oey=oe+y=oe+i etc.
This is one of the reason that cantonese sound is embedded and all cantonese speaker know how to say the character 虛 and all these characters have the same vowel: 堆推居驅虛追吹須錐 whether their vowel is coded as eoi, oei, or oey whatever system you want to.