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   <title>Period Chinese Names, Yale Romanization</title>
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<p>Yale Romanization is one system to represent Chinese characters with Roman letters, based on each character's pronunciation in the modern Cantonese dialect.  It is one of the three most commonly used systems in modern times.  However, the other two systems are based on the Mandarin dialect, which is more typically used in written matter whose readers are predominantly Westerners.</p>

<p>The superscripted numeral after a syllable is a tone indicator, included to help readers pronounce Chinese syllables.  However, with the possible exception of the umlaut of <i>&uuml;</i>, diacritical marks and tone indicators are pronunciation guides that are not currently registerable in the SCA.</p>

<p>There are many websites that describe Mandarin pronunciations, but few sites describe Cantonese pronunciations.  This author does not currently know of any sites that describe the Cantonese pronunciation of more than a few syllables.  If you are aware of a good website for learning Cantonese, please <a href="mailto:valerie_lee@ida.net">contact the author</a>.</p>

<p>In the meantime, you might be able to get pronunciation help from a Chinese American friend.  (This author has no idea if your friend speaks Cantonese, but many of the Chinese people who settled in the United States in the late 19<sup><font size="-1">th</font></sup> through mid 20<sup><font size="-1">th</font></sup> centuries spoke Cantonese.)

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