Re: Tone Romanization: Opinions Sought

From: David Peterson <thatbluecat@...>
> The
> reason is that I really don't like the Pinyin convention of putting
> a full-sized number after the word, e.g., "zhong1guo2".
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 believe that Wade-Giles regularly used tone numbers, though, and
that they were typically superscript rather than normal-size -- that
is, they were presented similarly to what you have.

> Anyway, I've come up with three possible systems, and I've listed
> them here:
>
> http://dedalvs.free.fr/sheli/tone.html
>
> I'm in the process of creating this page, and I've kind of gotten
> stuck on this romanization issue.  On this page you'll see three
> lists.  Each list will show what the exponent for each tone is, and
> below each list will be an example of a nonce six syllable compound
> with each of the six different tones.
What are permissible syllable shapes? From the nonce compounds,
syllables are CV - in which case you could also go the Hmong way and
use in-line letters to indicate tones: since syllable-final consonants
are very limited there, they can recycle letters for tones since at
the end of a syllable, they're unambiguously tones rather than
consonants. I know that at least -j and -b indicate tones there (see
e.g. "Hmoob" for "Hmong"); I think -s may also be a tonal letter.

On the other hand, http://dedalvs.free.fr/sheli/phonology.html gives
some examples of syllable-final consonants, so I'm not sure whether
that scheme is workable.

> (1) If it had to be one of these three systems, which would you
> prefer just based on the look of it?
I'd prefer the "1..6" convention, especially if there is a
conventional order of tones in Sheli. (For Cantonese, for example,
I've seen at least two methods of numbering the tones, but at least
that's better than having no regular numbering at all.)

> (2) The reason I wanted to use exponents is so the tone letter is
> on a different level than the word (especially important for a
> sytem that uses letters).  Do you think this is better or worse
> than the Pinyin convention?
I wouldn't call what you describe above "the Pinyin convention" - I
think that the *real* Pinyin convention is better since the tone is
marked directly on the vowel, rather than at the end of the syllable,
and even indicates the tone contour!

This wouldn't work quite as pictographically in languages such as
Cantonese or Sheli which have multiple tones with the same contour
(e.g. level) but at different pitches, but I think that marking above
the vowel may be the best.

It's probably not easily attainable in computing, though, given
current support for fonts. 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.

But if you want a separate position, then superscript marks at the end
of the syllable are probably a decent solution.

>  (3) Can you think of any different ideas?
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.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Watch the Reply-To!

Reply