Re: Tone Romanization: Opinions Sought

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/