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

Adam Walker scripsit:

> Tong Yong is the nasty little politico-linguistic beasty that the gov in
> Taipei has chosen as the "official" romanization in Taiwan.  It *is* HYPY
> sans "q" and "x".  Which makes for nothing but confusion if you ask me.
Um.  Right.  It would have made more sense imho to map zh sh ch to z s c,
given that the retroflexion probably isn't even pronounced in Taiwan
(given this reform, should we start writing Daiwan?)

> >The few words of GR that I actually remember, I have no trouble with,
> >whereas I am constantly stuffing the wrong tone mark on HYPY syllables!
> >Of course, *deciphering* the GR in real time is no joke either.
> >
>
> I find the tone marks for HYPY very intuitive since they are the "shapes"
> the tones have for me when I visualize them.
I agree that the shapes are very sensible.  Jim Carter (author of -gua!spi,
which can also be written -gua\spi) uses a sensible method also:
put the tone character first, and use - / _ \ for 1 2 3 4 respectively.
This is ASCII-iconic, given that tone 3 is basically low.
(The reason for the ! is problems typing \ in TeX contexts.)

--
John Cowan           http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
Please leave your values        |       Check your assumptions.  In fact,
   at the front desk.           |          check your assumptions at the door.
     --sign in Paris hotel      |            --Miles Vorkosigan