CHAT: Pinyin Reformed (Re: John Cowan mangles Pinyin again)

>From: John Cowan <jcowan@...>
>Generally speaking the checked syllables of the ru tone in Middle
>Chinese got distributed semi-randomly among the other three tones
>when final stops were lost.  If there truly are more of them
>in the 4th tone (= Middle 3rd tone) category, I'd be interested
>in the evidence.
There is a HUGE database of Unihan characters somewhere among the dusty
shelves at Unicode.org.  Let me find the URL...

http://charts.unicode.org/unihan.html

Beware: this is one complicated thing we're dealing with here.  It's hard to
read, and the .txt file with the names and other data (no glyps) is
something like a meg plus -- there you get Cantonese (modified Yale
translit) along with Japanese (native and Sino-Japanese), Korean and
Mandarin pronunciations.  Good luck!

>The objection here is that ' is used in all (except Yale?) romanizations
>to divide syllables when the "natural" division is wrong,
>thus Chang'an to avoid reading Chan'gan, or Xi'an to avoid reading Xian.
Oh, sorry; I was thinking in terms of Pinyin.  I used to have memorized the
Yale method of transing, but all I remember is that "szu" syllable sounded
like "szzzzz", roughly speaking.

>Toneless syllables are very few in number, though very common.
>I say write them as if in the first tone, and live with the ambiguity.
Again I say the unmarked form.  Oh yeah, and what do you do about ü
(u-umlaut) if you want a ASCII-only system?  Using Y as a vowel perhaps?

But as for the retroflexes, I'd just leave them with the -h marking.  But -r
isn't unreasonable at all.

Danny
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