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Re: Tone Romanization: Opinions Sought

From:David Peterson <thatbluecat@...>
Date:Friday, October 1, 2004, 8:12
Philip wrote:

<<
I think this is "ASCII Pinyin" - regular Pinyin uses vowel diacritics
(macron, acute, caron/hacek, grave, respectively, for the four tones).
The in-line digits style is an artefact of plain ASCII computer text,
I'd say.
>>
I don't know anything about Chinese. I just searched around on the internet until I found an example I was looking for. Now, though, I know the difference. Thanks! I was aware of the Hmong system, but Sheli has too many coda consonants. This idea... Philip wrote: << Gwoyeu Romatzyh comes to mind - indicating the tone by the spelling of the syllable (e.g. doubling vowels or changing "ng" to "nq" or adding "r" or the like), but I think Sheli has too many phonemes compared to the number of letters in the Roman alphabet to be able to go this way.
>>
...is intriguing, but it might not be too user-friendly. I'll think about it, though. I'd certainly like to ask you about this, though: Philip wrote: << You needn't stick to precomposed vowel-plus-diacritics since in principle, Unicode lets you apply any diacritic to any letter (so Cyrillic-zhe plus underdot, macron above, and rhotic hook is just as possible as a-grave), but current font rendering technology will probably mean that the result is not very pretty on screen or paper, unfortunately.
>>
Try as I might, I can't get my browser to display this. In my Unicode charts, there's a section called "combining diacritical marks". This seemed like an easy solution. Too easy, it would seem. Whenever I enter the appropriate Unicode number the diacritic mark is displayed *next to* the character in question, and *not* on top of it! I've searched through all the diacritic marks, and the only one that does what I expected it to was the "tiebar" used in IPA when, for example, you want to say a series of [t] and [s] is an affricate, and not merely a sequence of two consonants. With everything else, it's displayed as character + diacritic, side-by-side. I've tried looking on all the browsers available to me (i.e., Safari, Netscape and Firefox). Is it just because I have a Mac? [P.S.: When I hit "reply", this went straight to you.] [P.P.S.: Incidentally, thanks, Philip, for the detailed reply on my post that replaced the thorn with the Japanese character. I tried emending my quotation method. Is it sufficient?] -David ******************************************************************* "sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze." "No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn." -Jim Morrison http://dedalvs.free.fr/