RE: Unicode Transcriptions

From: Thomas Chan (thomas@atlas.datexx.com)
Date: Fri Feb 16 2001 - 06:22:02 EST


On Fri, 16 Feb 2001, Marco Cimarosti wrote:

> 2) Which Chinese dialect to adopt for transliterating.

Mandarin would be the most likely.

> Notice the particularities of Bopomofo spelling:
>
> - the sound (spelled "ong" in pinyin) is spelled "u-eng";
> - there is no "y" in "yi";
> - there is no sign to indicate the 1st tone.

[snip]
 
> Also notice that you may have a few typographical problems in producing the
> picture:
>
> a) In most fonts, the glyph for vowel i is a horizontal line. This is only
> valid for vertical texts: in horizontal writing it should be vertical.
> (Suggestion: you may substitute it with an uppercase I from a sans-serif
> font).

Yes, you are right about this. I don't know why TUS3.0 p. 278 says "The
character U+3127 BOPOMOFO LETTER I is usually written as a vertical
stroke when Bopomofo text is set vertically.", which is *wrong*.

 
> b) The glyph for the "combining breve" (3rd tone) is normally designed to
> fit on western lowercase vowels. (Suggestion: if you use a bigger size for
> the combining marks, you might get a correct result).

I've made two .gif files demonstrating Bopomofo typography:

  http://deall.ohio-state.edu/grads/chan.200/misc/biaozhunwanguoma.gif
  http://deall.ohio-state.edu/grads/chan.200/misc/tongyima.gif

Both depict left-to-right Han character text, and each character is
annotated on its right side with top-to-bottom Bopomofo text.

(Alternatively, I could have created versions where the Han character text
runs top-to-bottom, and each character is annotated on its right side with
top-to-bottom Bopomofo text, but I didn't.)

Note the place of the tone diacritics, which is "stacked" even more to the
right than the Bopomofo consonants and vowels.

Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu



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