I was delighted to learn that Lion supports text-to-speech with a bunch of new voices that include not only non-American English accents (like Irish, South African, and to my surprise, Indian); not only non-English languages (like French as it sounds in both Canada and France); and not only two Mandarin accents (China and Taiwan); but also Cantonese.

I'm in a situation where it occasionally helps to know the Cantonese pronunciation for a phrase where I only have the written Chinese characters. Google Translate does a great job with Mandarin but has no Cantonese support. The Chinese University of Hong Kong has a site that does Cantonese text-to-speech, but the sound quality isn't great. A company called PiTL has an app that looks pretty good, but it only runs on Windows Mobile or Android, and I don't use either of those at the moment. It sure would be nice to have an iOS version.

The good news is that now, with Lion, all I have to do is select the "Sin-Ji" voice in my System Preferences. Now I can select Chinese text in any application and use the "Start Speaking" contextual menu item to hear it in Cantonese. For further convenience I've mapped "Start Speaking" to a keyboard shortcut in my System Preferences.

Here's an example of how I used this feature. A few weeks ago I got an email from a young woman named Kim who teaches an informal Cantonese class at a cafe in Chinatown. (They happened to be at the next table from me one day, and I'd gone over and talked to her.) In her email, Kim encouraged me to "guy jook hawk daw dee", which she explained means "continue to learn more".

I knew how to pronounce the "hawk daw dee". But I didn't know what the correct tones are for "guy jook", and that's not something I'd know how to find out from Kim over email. Besides, I'm a geek and wanted to figure it out myself. All I needed was the Chinese characters.

A Google search for "guy jook" turned up nothing useful. I tried "gai jook" and found that it occurs in the lyrics for a song called "Hou Sum Fan Sau" ("Break-Up With Good Intentions"). I searched for other sites with lyrics to that song and found an alternate spelling: "gai juk". Ah, I should have thought of that. Googling for "gai juk" easily found the Chinese characters I wanted:

繼續

Simplified version:

继续

Definition: "to continue; to persist".

For those of you who don't have the Sin-Ji voice installed, here's how it sounds:

Now I can pronounce Kim's whole phrase: "guy jook hawk daw dee" — "continue to learn more".

By the way, this "gai juk" should not be confused with the words for chicken congee — 鸡粥 — which sounds like this:

Can you hear the difference in tone? I ate chicken congee growing up, and it's delicious, but not what I was looking for.

Now the bad news: there's a glaring flaw in the Sin-Ji voice.

If you know any Cantonese at all, it's probably the traditional greeting "Nay ho ma?" — 你好吗? — which literally means "Are you good?" (Also often pronounced "Lay ho ma?") Naturally this is the first thing I tried when I learned about Lion's Cantonese support.

Here's how the Sin-Ji voice pronounces it:

The problem is that the "ma" is glaringly wrong. Since Cantonese is a tonal language, like all Chinese dialects, you're supposed to sort of sing each word with the correct intonation. Here's how it's supposed to sound:

I've submitted a bug report to Apple, with Radar number 9949661. I flagged it as a serious bug, because that "ma" at the end of a sentence turns it into a question. It is used a lot.

[UPDATE: For my own future reference, I'm adding this link to a site that translates Chinese characters to Jyutping, which is a Romanization system for Cantonese. I don't know how to read Jyutping — indeed, I had to use the Sin-Ji voice to find out how to pronounce "Jyutping" — but it's been handy for confirming that certain words have the same tone as words I know. I know this because the Jyutping for two words may be spelled differently but will have the same tone number at the end.]

[UPDATE, 2013-10-08: The inflection in "Nay ho ma" is fixed in the updated Cantonese voice in Mavericks. I didn't check whether it had been fixed before that.]