Re: Gwoyeu Romatzyh marking the optional neutral tone

From: Robert Abel (freakrob@googlemail.com)
Date: Mon Jul 13 2009 - 03:51:22 CDT

  • Next message: Christoph Burgmer: "Re: Gwoyeu Romatzyh marking the optional neutral tone"

    Hi Charlie,

    I was just contemplating whether that was what the author intended and
    printing was just not possible. Those characters (shown in Christoph's
    pictures) bear a close resemblance to some combining characters used in
    IPA as well. It happened to match (IPA: voiceless), so I said that's
    what I'd use instead of a Latin subscript letter.

    Robert

    P.S.: You seem to not have forwarded this message to the list. This
    probably was not intended.

    Charlie Ruland schrieb:
    > No, Robert, what Christoph was looking for was not an IPA character to
    > mark voicelessness, but a Gwoyeu Romatzyh transcription character to
    > express optional tone neutralization.
    >
    > I personally do not expect there is an ‘encouraged’ Unicode character
    > for this marginal case which is by no means standard Gwoyeu Romatzyh
    > usage.
    >
    > Seeing that compulsory neutral tone is expressed with a full stop
    > (u+002E) I wonder if Y. R. Chao didn’t have an ideographic full stop
    > (u+3002) in mind when he was looking for a way to express optional
    > tone neutralization. The only trouble is: in all *computer* fonts I
    > know this character always has ‘full width’, so it doesn’t look as
    > intended...
    >
    > Regards,
    > Charlie
    >
    > ***** Original Message/原始郵件 *****
    > From/寄件者: Robert Abel <freakrob@googlemail.com>
    > Subject/主旨: Re: Gwoyeu Romatzyh marking the optional neutral tone
    > To/收件者: Unicode General <unicode@unicode.org>
    > Date/日期: Mon Jul 13 2009 07:28:10 GMT+0200
    >> Hi,
    >>
    >> are you sure it is supposed to look like the scans you provided? It
    >> might be that the printing for the book was fairly limited and could not
    >> account for these characters' true glyphs?
    >> I would personally go with <U+0064><U+0325>, this provides d̥ for me
    >> which has the circle right under the d with an appropriate font.
    >>
    >> --> http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/8477/bujydaw.png
    >>
    >> How encourage this is I don't know, but at least it would conform to IPA
    >> as in being voiceless or nearly so.
    >>
    >> Robert Abel
    >>
    >> Christoph Burgmer schrieb:
    >>
    >>> I am looking for a character used in a Romanization of Mandarin
    >>> Chinese called Gwoyeu Romatzyh. It is the symbol denoting the
    >>> optional neutral tone in Mandarin which is marked by Chao [1] with
    >>> a preceding subscript circle [2, 3, 4]. Wikipedia gives an example
    >>> using markup: bujy<sub>o</sub>daw [5].
    >>>
    >>> Now Unicode encodes U+2092 (ₒ, LATIN SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER O). I
    >>> don't know if this character is applicable for my case - it does
    >>> provide the correct glyph. Is its usage encouraged?
    >>>
    >>> -Christoph Burgmer
    >>>
    >>> [1] Yuen Ren Chao: Mandarin Primer: an intensive course in spoken
    >>> Chinese. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1948
    >>> [2]
    >>> http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uyhc/files/images/p1070002.preview.jpg
    >>>
    >>> [3]
    >>> http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uyhc/files/images/p1070003.preview.jpg
    >>>
    >>> [4]
    >>> http://www.stud.uni-karlsruhe.de/~uyhc/files/images/p1070010.preview.jpg
    >>>
    >>> [5]
    >>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_in_Gwoyeu_Romatzyh#Tonal_rules
    >>>
    >>
    >>
    >

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