Postby simon4883 » January 4th, 2012 7:37 pm
The reason the pronunciations seem nonstandard is because they're not Cantonese! The Core100 list (and the other lists as well) are not lists of Cantonese words, plain and simple. They're Mandarin vocab lists. I was very excited to read that there would be these sorts of lists for Cantonese, since they're generally not availible on the web. Vocab lists for Mandarin are all over the place, however.
The example 能吃 sounds weird simply because it's not a Cantonese word. It's the Mandarin expression neng2 chi1. The corresponding Cantonese expression would be 食得, sik6 dak1 (Jyutping). "Nang4 hek3" is what you get when you write down the Mandarin word and then say it with Cantonese pronunciation, but of course saying it with a Cantonese pronunciation doesn't make it Cantonese, any more than reading German with English pronunciation makes it English.
Now, because of the diglossia that is common in Cantonese-speaking areas, Mandarin is generally used for most formal writing. One will encounter situations where Mandarin is read with Cantonese pronunciation (for example in most cantopop songs), so a list like this one is certainly useful (albeit to a student of Cantonese, probably much less useful than a corresponding list of Cantonese words). It is also a lot easier to get such a list for Mandarin, since this work has already been done by others. So I understand why this list is here. However, I think it's wrong to promote it as a "core" list of "Cantonese" words, since many aren't Cantonese at all, and even if they're useful to learn, they're certainly not "core" vocabulary.