Re: Tone Romanization: Opinions Sought

David Peterson wrote:

> As I said in an earlier post, I'm developing a tone language....(snip)....
> but
> I've been pretty much forced into using exponents for tone.   The
> reason is that I really don't like the Pinyin convention of putting
> a full-sized number after the word, e.g., Looks
> too monolinear to me.   This is why I decided on exponents.
> (Well, that combined with the fact that using any system of
> diacritics proved impossible.)
I encountered the same problem with Gwr.  Diacritics would be the desirable
solution, but since I'm using "è" (e-grave) or "æ" (ae-lig) for /E/,
"ò"(o-grave) for /O/ and "ÿ" (y-uml) for /1/, it's not possible (within my
abilities), nor particularly attractive. I don't want diacritics following
words, that looks messy, and acute and grave are sometimes hard to see.

So for purely mnemonic purposes, and to enable readers (and me) to pronounce
things accurately, I went with superscript letters, as you can see in my Gwr
text at: http://steen.free.fr/relay10/gwr.html   In recent emails, and for
my own temporary purposes, I've been using in-line _hyphen plus letter_...
well, it works :-(

From a professional, descriptive and aesthetic POV, superscript numbers
would be best; but that would present problems for the casual reader, who
might not know, or might tend to forget, the number=tone correlations. (Just
as I, for ex., have no idea how "zhong1guo2" should be read.)   Also, of
course, superscripts are so easy to do in HTML, though cumbersome in normal
typing.

>
>
> http://dedalvs.free.fr/sheli/tone.html
>
> Anyway, if I may, I'd like to ask for the following info from
> anyone who wants to offer their opinion:
>
> (1) If it had to be one of these three systems, which would you
> prefer just based on the look of it?
As I say, I think superscript numbers are desirable, but superscript letters
are more practical. One problem with your examples, is your italic
type-face, which makes them a little too small, hard to read. (The font Jan
used for the relay texts is particularly clear.)

As to how you correlate number=tone, 1 - 5  hi-lo or 5 - 1 etc. is a matter
of choice AFAICS. Maybe you will find something within the language that
would justify one choice over another. ----Needless to say, in native Gwr
script, tone marking is not a problem; after much thought, I've decided to
go with the largish, rather representational marks that embrace the syllable
character (I tried smaller diacritic-type things, which didn't work, didn't
look good).
>
> (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).
Agreed.

>  Do you think this is better or worse
> than the Pinyin convention?
>
The Pinyin isn't all that bad; I just don't like numbers interrupting the
flow of text.

> (3) Can you think of any different ideas?
No :-(
>

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