Re: USAGE: Yet another try at Pinyin-compatible tonal spelling for Mandarin

From: "John Cowan"

> > Still, the whole sentence
> > strikes me as a little choppy and weird, but maybe that's just
> > because I, non-native, wouldn't express it this idea this way.
> It's straight out of Li & Thompson, actually.  It's about their
> longest example, and it's from the section on elision of
> pronouns (that "taa" appearing only at the end).
I assumed you got it from L&T, so I don't question its grammaticality. I
found said sentence in my own volume, and I understand what they're trying
to illustrate, but it still just sounds weird to me, even in English. "In
came a guy with red eyes, a round face, and a hat. His (sur)name was Xia."
Red eyes? Is he an albino? Drunk? Too, there's the lack of parallelism.
Physical feature, physical feature, hat. To be sure, there are legit
sentences which describe both appearance and clothing, but something about
this one bothers me. Maybe I'd feel better if it were a suit? Dunno. It just
reads to me like a bad parody of a Mickey Spillane novel. (I've tweeked the
translation for effect, but I think you get my point).

Kou