Oh, no!  Please, no!  This is worse than Tong Yong pin yin!  It has all the
nastiness of Gwoyeu Romatzyh with none of the virtues of Pinyin.  I shivver
just looking at it.  And to thing I've been ranting about Tong Young.

Adam who HATES tonal spelling, but still inflicted it on a conlang once.

So lift the cup of joy and take a big drink.
In spite of it all it's a beautiful world.
-------Suzanne Knutzen




>From: John Cowan <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: USAGE: Yet another try at Pinyin-compatible tonal spelling for
>          Mandarin
>Date: Tue, 18 Sep 2001 00:54:02 -0400
>
>The virtues of tonal spelling are well-known for languages like Hmong,
>which can
>add otherwise unused finals like -b and -s to indicate the tone.  Mandarin
>has
>too many sounds for that: the standard Pinyin orthography uses every basic
>Latin letter except v, and five diacritics: symbols for tones 1, 2, 3, and
>4,
>and diaeresis over u when it represents /y/.
>
>Gwoyeu Romatzyh is a tonal spelling requiring no diacritics, but it is very
>complex and messy.  This proposal is meant to add the virtues of
>diacritic-lless
>spelling to the comparative simplicity of Pinyin.
>
>The tonal McGuffin here is to represent the long tones 1 and 3 by a doubled
>vowel, and the low(-ending) tones 3 and 4 by an -h suffix.  Thus
>ma1, ma2, ma3, and ma4 are respectively maa, ma, maah, mah.
>The h is placed after the final (hen3 is written heenh, shang4 as shangh).
>However, the retroflex r remains after the h, since it is not really
>part of the final, except in the case of the final "er".
>
>A few special cases:
>
>1) If one syllable of a compound word ends in h, and the next begins
>with a, e, o, or u, then an apostrophe is inserted, similar to the
>aprostrophe used between finals ending in -n and initials beginning with g.
>
>2) In syllables like dui, where the main vowel is not written, it is
>"doubled" by being written: so dui2 is dui, but dui1 is duei.
>
>In Pinyin, the u-umlaut is used only after l and n; in all other cases,
>its presence can be inferred from the other letters, and it is written u.
>In this proposal, the forms lyu and nyu are used.
>
>3) Toneless syllables are written as if in tone 2.
>
>Here's a sentence:
>
>Waihbian jinhlaile yi ge ren liaangh ge hong yaanhjing, yi fuh dah yuan
>liaanh, daih zhe yi ge xiaaoh maohzi, taa xingh Xiah.
>
>--
>John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              [log in to unmask]
>Please leave your values        |       Check your assumptions.  In fact,
>    at the front desk.           |          check your assumptions at the
>door.
>      --sign in Paris hotel      |            --Miles Vorkosigan


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