From: TAN@CWU.BITNET
Subject: pinyin reform
X-Envelope-To: soc.culture.china@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 18:12:00 GMT
X-Vms-To: IN%"soc.culture.china@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu"

A way to make tone indicators part of spellings in pinyin

In the pinyin system, the four tones are arranged in the order of: level(-),
rising (/), dipping(V), and falling (\). They are also conveniently called
first tone through fourth tone. When characters in dictionary are entered
alphabetically by pinyin, this sub-order is adopted for each spelling. In
addition, the the light tone is defined as fifth tone.

The present rule is that the diacritical mark is placed above the main vowel
of a spelling.  A spelling without diacritical mark is in light tone.
It is impossible to type the diacritical marks to right position on standard
English keyboard. Therefore, I suggest the following rules of tone indication
without diacritical marks.

Example 1:

1. zhe, 2. zzhe, 3. zhhe, 4. zhee, 5. zhe

The first tone (#1) and light tone (#5) are in regular pinyin spelling. As
none of characters in light tone are independent semantically, such as a,
le, ya, ma, ne, ba, de, guo, li, me, etc., and usually are placed at either the
beginning or end of a sentence, they will easily distinguish from the
first-tone characters.

If a letter is doubled, the POSITION of second doubled letter indicates the
tone. In above instance, the position of second z in zzhe (#2), second h in
zhhe (#3), second e in zhee (#4) indicate second, third, or third tone
respectively.  All the five spellings are pronounced 'zhe' when the tones are
ignored.

Difficulties come up for spellings that consist of only one or two letters.
For instance, it is impossible to express the third- and fourth-tone e's, and
fourth-tone ba (\, father).  It would look awkward if a letter is tripled or
even quadrupled, writing as eee, eeee, and baaa. Here I provide a tentative
solutions.

Select two letters to indicate the third and fourth tones respectively,
for spellings that are less than three letters.  I select 'h' for
third tone, and 'v' for the fourth.

The reason to choose 'h' is it is preferrably placed at end of some spellings
in the Wide-Gile system, such as 'yeh'.  'v' is not used in pinyin, but it is
on the English keyboard.  So I use it for tone.

Example 2:

e=e(-)=e(light tone), ee = e(/),  eh = (v), ev=(\).

Example 3:

ba=ba(-)=ba(light tone), bba=(/), baa=(v), bav=(\).

Woo shii zhong gguo rren. Woo aiv woo de zuv gguo.
(I am a Chinese.  I love my home country.)

Following are two Ttang poems:

cchuang qqian mming yuee guang,
yyi shii div shaang shuang,
juu ttou wanng mming yuee,
di ttou si guv xiang.

(The moonlight is shining my bed,
It looks like frost on the floor,
Looking up the bright moon,
Looking down, I miss my home town.)

cchu hhe rii dang wuh,
hann di hhe xiaa tuu,
sshui zhi ppan zhong can,
liv li jie xin kuh.

(In the burning sun, I am weeding the rice field,
And is my sweat dripping to soil under the sprouts.
Few know the grains of rice in their bowls
that were produced with great hardship!)

If interested, please send suggestions, comments, and criticism directly to
TAN@CWU.  I have no access to usenet.

Julian Zhang
Newsgroups: soc.culture.china,soc.culture.taiwan