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

On Tue, Sep 18, 2001 at 07:55:52AM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> Adam Walker scripsit:
>
> > Oh, no!  Please, no!  This is worse than Tong Yong pin yin!  It has all the
> > nastiness of Gwoyeu Romatzyh with none of the virtues of Pinyin.  I shivver
> > just looking at it.  And to thing I've been ranting about Tong Young.
>
> What's that?  And if you think my poor little scheme has all the nastiness
> of GR, then you have not grokked in fullness just how nasty GR is....
I actually kind of like this system :)

GR (and Hmong, too, IMHO) are icky because they use all these superfluous
letters to mark the tone, and those can sometimes get confusing.

I like this system because it uses double letters, h's, and other things that,
to use the absolutely scientific term (*giggle*) just "don't look like they
shouldn't be there."

I mean, you can put numbers after the words, or diacritics on them (an ok
idea, except I kind of don't like how most computer fonts don't have the
right marks for pinyin).  I don't know what way is better.  I do think,
though, that for what it's designed to do, pinyin is pretty close to
ideal.