Re: THEORY: Mandarin vowel phonology

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.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin