Wong Shik Ling (also known as S. L. Wong) published a scheme of phonetic symbols for Cantonese based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in the book A Chinese Syllabary Pronounced According to the Dialect of Canton. The scheme has been widely used in Chinese dictionaries published in Hong Kong. The scheme, known as S. L. Wong system (), is a broad phonemic transcription system based on IPA and its analysis of Cantonese phonemes is grounded in the theories of Y. R. Chao. Other than the phonemic transcription system, Wong also derived a romanisation scheme published in the same book. See S. L. Wong (romanisation). History Before devising the system, Wong studied many phonetic transcription and romanisation systems, including Eitel's and other earlier schemes, for Cantonese. He found that many of them were not accurate enough for use. He researched Cantonese and published his results in the book in 1938. Use The system, with minor variations, has been adopted by some other Hong Kong Chinese dictionaries including 中文字典, Chinese Dictionary by 喬硯農 (Kiu Yin Nung), 中華新字典, Chung Hwa New Dictionary and 商務新字典, Commercial Press New Dictionary. Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau formulates Cantonese Pinyin romanisations based on the system. In Chinese phonological studies, other systems more phonetic in character are collectively referred to as the narrow transcription (i.e., phonetic transcription) even though they are not necessarily exact phonetic transcription systems. The various narrow transcriptions by different scholars are not identical due to the scholars' differing analyses of the Cantonese phonemes (for example, the phoneme might be analyzed as ). For convenience purposes, in the rest of this article, when the broad system is mentioned, it refers to S. L. Wong's system; when narrow is mentioned, it refers to a representative narrow system but does not imply that all narrow systems are as described. Phonology Cantonese, like other varieties of Chinese, is monosyllabic. Each syllable is divided into an initial (consonant), final (vowel and following consonant) and tone. Finals Chinese phonology traditionally stresses finals because they are related to rhymes in the composition of poems, proses and articles. There are 53 finals in Cantonese. Except and , long and short vowels in Cantonese have complementary distributions and therefore do not function contrastively. Thus, and can be considered the same phoneme ; the same can be said of and (representing the same phoneme ), and and (also written ) (representing the