Re: Bopomofo and pinyin

From: "John Cowan"

> DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
> > Personally, I'd like something a little
> > more universal, so that a rising tone, be it 25 or 35, were marked
similarly
> > so that the system could be used from dialect to dialect.
>
> By "dialect" do you mean "Sinitic language", or "(ordinary) dialect
> of Mandarin"?
> If the former, I think it's hopeless: mapping the 11 Cantonese tones onto
> the 4 Mandarin ones is not gonna work.
What I meant to express here was that a Mandarin fourth tone, a Taiwanese
second tone, what you might classify a Cantonese falling high tone (pick the
number of your choice), and a Shanghainese first tone are analogous
sound-wise, if not precisely the same (varying from 53, 52, 51, or 42).
Thus, finding some universal symbol, be it a diacritic like "\", a number
like 2, or a letter value like "-c" would be useful to me. Rising tones are
similarly analogous. The Mandarin third tone is its own beast, so gets its
own coding, but so what? And I've argued with you before that from my
perspective, a Cantonese middle even tone is much the same creature as a
middle "clipped" tone, so I would mark these identically. For me, it's not a
matter of mapping 11 tones onto 4. It's saying: "Okay, there are X amount of
Chinese tones out there. Let's map the similar ones similarly and find
unique representations for those which are unique. That would however mean
renaming tradtional tone conventions in each dialect.

So something like:

Mandarin     Shanghai      Canton         Taiwan      mark

1  (55)           5 (55)         1 (55)           1 (55)        _

2  (35)           3  (35)         2  (35)          4  (35)       /
                      4  (25)

3   (232)                                                                  v

4   (53)           1 (52)          1(53)            2 (53)        \

                       2 (34)
x

                                            3 (33)         7 (33)         =

                                            4   (31)       3  (31)        >

and so on (again, doesn't have to be diacritics). The exact tonal 5 thorugh
1 system may not be 100% accurate, but I hope you get the idea.

> If the latter, there are still problems. Sichuan Mandarin, IIRC,
pronounces
> 3 as 4 and 4 as 3; the writing system should preserve the phonological
> rather than the strictly phonetic tone.  Ditto we probably want to ignore
> tone sandhi.
I'm not quite sure what you mean here, but for example, Mandarin third tone,
low dipping rising (3-2-3) becomes a high falling tone in Taiwanese (5-2).
What's wrong with saying Mandarin "mav" corresponds to Taiwanese "ma\"?
I agree with bagging tone sandhi in the transcription; those who learn the
dialect should be familiar with the sandhi rules of that dialect.

Kou