Re: THEORY: Mandarin vowel phonology

John Cowan:

>Danny Wier scripsit:
>
> > Where have I heard of Gwoyeu Romatzyh before?  Tell me more about it!
>
>It was invented by Yuen Ren Chao, and it's a tonal-spelling system,
>which hard-codes the tone into each syllable using special spelling
>conventions instead of leaving it as an easily-lost diacritic.
>Thus, ma1 = "ma", ma2 = "mar" (GR uses -l instead of -r for retroflexion),
>ma3 = "maa", ma4 = "mah".  It's not as simple as "suffix -r, double, suffix
>-h",
>though.
>
>There is an excellent Web page at:
>http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/8351/Romatzyh.html by David
>Prager Banner, who's a big fan of it.
I love it!!  I'm gonna learn it, and kinda experiment with my own
transcription system.  I like that it doesn't use numbers or diacritics, so
of course it's 7-bit compatible, and easier for native English speakers to
read.  (I have that problem with Hausa and Yoruba, neither language I know
except how to read phonetically.  I see accents and relate them to vowel
quality or length, not tone, like in Portuguese and the like...)

Danny

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com