Re: Bopomofo and pinyin

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.

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.

> Wokmanv def zhudguov shid huawyuanv...
>
> is a strain slightly akin to GR.
I think the strain arises from breaking the letter-sound connection, the
notion that a letter (esp. a consonant) means some sound or other.  In tonal
spellings, sometimes it does, and sometimes it means a suprasegmental.

Jim Carter (the -gua!spi guy) likes to use punctuation for tones, and writes
it before the syllable, so you know what's coming.  "!" is really "\", tone 4,
though -gua!spi has six tones (IMHO too many).

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