I've just joined this community fairly recently, and through it I've learned so much already.. we're so fortunate to have such a great resource at our fingertips
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"Gung hei fat choy" (恭喜發財)is Cantonese. Literally, it's something like "I wish you happiness (喜) and wealth (財)!"
I'm not sure what the "usual pronunciation guides" are. The Yale romanisation is "Gung1 hei2 faat3 choi4". A rough IPA would be [kʊŋ53 hei35 fɑ:t33 tsʰɔ:i21]. (The numbers represent tone levels, "1" being the lowest and "5" the highest. So if "3" is the middle of your range, then "2" is a bit below that and "1" is a bit lower still. If both numbers are the same, the tone is steady, but if they are different, it shifts from one tone level to another during the course of the vowel.)
The Mandarin pronunciation would be very different indeed--"Gong1 xi3 fa1 cai2" in Pinyin romanisation. But I don't really hear Mandarin speakers use this phrase; they seem much more likely to say "Xin1 nian2 kuai4le4!" (新年快樂) which is more literally "May your new (新) year (年) be happy (快樂)!"
Wonderful, thank you! This is very helpful. However, I can't see the Chinese characters in your reply, and I checked the user info and the memories for the community and couldn't see how to activate them. Do you happen to know?
It all depends what kind of machine you're running with what OS. Microsoft offers a free East Asian language support download on its website; I'm not sure what the details are for MacOS. You may already have the fonts you need but simply don't have the right browser support turned on. When you check the appropriate FAQs, it will help you to know that the encoding I use is Big5 (Traditional Chinese).
If all else fails, I can spell out how to find the characters on this extremely useful site, which displays them as images so they're viewable without any mucking about.
People down here in Shenzhen certainly use this when speaking Mandarin. Even non-Cantonese speakers. It's becoming one of those things from Cantonese that's creeping into Mandarin, I guess.
The romanisation is all Hanyu Pinyin, but it looks to me like the first half of the most common Cantonese expression (恭喜發財) stuck together with the second half of the most common Mandarin expression (新年快樂). I don't recall ever hearing it or seeing it in print before.
According to languagesblog's comment right below, it's possible and (common) to say gong xi fa cai... as a Mandarin expression so combining the two isn't really half-Mandarin and half-Cantonese since all the words are pronounced in Mandarin, it seems.
For what it's worth, I hear both phrases used pretty much equally often in the Mandarin-speaking circles I frequent, mostly speakers from Taiwan.
I'm not sure what the "usual pronunciation guides" are. The Yale romanisation is "Gung1 hei2 faat3 choi4". A rough IPA would be [kʊŋ53 hei35 fɑ:t33 tsʰɔ:i21]. (The numbers represent tone levels, "1" being the lowest and "5" the highest. So if "3" is the middle of your range, then "2" is a bit below that and "1" is a bit lower still. If both numbers are the same, the tone is steady, but if they are different, it shifts from one tone level to another during the course of the vowel.)
The Mandarin pronunciation would be very different indeed--"Gong1 xi3 fa1 cai2" in Pinyin romanisation. But I don't really hear Mandarin speakers use this phrase; they seem much more likely to say "Xin1 nian2 kuai4le4!" (新年快樂) which is more literally "May your new (新) year (年) be happy (快樂)!"
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If all else fails, I can spell out how to find the characters on this extremely useful site, which displays them as images so they're viewable without any mucking about.
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For what it's worth, I hear both phrases used pretty much equally often in the Mandarin-speaking circles I frequent, mostly speakers from Taiwan.
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but combining two distinct expressions into one mashup is a little odd and I don't think i've heard it before either.
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