Re: John Cowan mangles Pinyin again

You know, John, I was thinking... I compared a bunch of Chinese words with
their Korean and Japanese equivalent, and found that many of these borrowed
into the latter two (and pronounced in Cantonese and other "Chinese"
languages) -- many end in <k>.  Any tone could be represented, but it seems
to be most predominant with tone four.  A quick, sharp fall in tone kinda
sounds like a "checked" syllable, that is, cut short with a glottal stop or
other stop consonant.

So, tone four could be marked with an apostrophe: _ma'_ for _ma4_ "scold".

Tone three is "drawn out", I'd use a double vowel there.  Tone one and two
are too similar for my ears to really determine, but I was thinking using
the <h> suffix for tone two, and no modifications for tone one.  Except what
do you do with the so-called "tone five", the indistinct tone?

I used to be somewhat familar with Guoyeu Romatzyh...

Danny

>From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
>Reply-To: Constructed Languages List <CONLANG@...>
>To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
>Subject: John Cowan mangles Pinyin again
>Date: Mon, 7 Feb 2000 18:08:01 -0500
>
>Okay, here's my next attempt to get a Pinyin-type tone spelling working.
>Unfortunately, it requires breaking certain Pinyin letter-sound
>mappings, but that's the price of the omelet.
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