A while back I wrote about a book I had recently purchased that relied solely on a system of transcribing tones that admittedly I hadn’t really encountered before then. To save you the trouble of looking back at the old post, the system is as follows:
| 平 | 上 | 去 | 入 | |
| 阴 | ꜀ | ꜂ | ꜄ | ꜆ |
| yin ping | yin shang | yin qu | yin ru | |
| 阳 | ꜁ | ꜃ | ꜅ | ꜇ |
| yang ping | yang shang | yang qu | yang ru |
They’re far from intuitive but I think I’ve developed a new-found respect for them. I just might have to flip-flop on my previous declaration of non-use. I bring them up now because I just saw them again, this time in《杭州方言音系》by 王启龙 at Tsinghua University. I’ve been on this bookish research kick for the last couple of days reading, or rather attempting to read, anything i could get my hands on. In this particular text we’re given this:
꜀k’o 科窠稞 ( 科)
k’o꜅ 颗课
꜂ŋo 我
ŋo꜅ 饿
Earlier in the text those three tones, yin ping yang qu and yin shang are given as 435, 24 and 53 respectively. So, it could be rewritten as this:
kho435 科窠稞 ( 科)
kho24 颗课
ŋo53 我
ŋo24 饿
Which would be very helpful if you only needed a few words at a time. It’s much less useful when you’re writing out thousands of characters at once. Beyond that, it struck me as exceptionally useful when looking at more than one dialect at a time. It seems likely that as words shift to take on other tones you’d be able to follow it though to see where and when certain changes would have taken place. This may be more of a server-side feature than something useful to people just trying to learn a few phrases.
The only real problem I still have with the system is the one mentioned by John in the comments to the earlier post. It’s not at all intuitive. However the other systems such as numerical values or graphical (214 vs ˨˩˦) don’t address the traditional tone system, which I think is definitely worth holding on to in some form or another. So, in the end, it looks like I’ll be keeping both methods handy.
For what it’s worth, I’ll stick to the numbers for the site unless it’s of some specific value to refer to 阴入 by anything other than the name.
The categories glyphs are really for a different purpose than the Chao tone numbers or letters. The only widespread alternative I know of is to number them 1 to 8. The way Cao does it in 南部吴语 is to put both contour numbers and category numbers in superscript on the right, distinguished only by length — categories are one digit, contours are two or three digits, and when you have a short contour you sometimes have to add a zero (koʔ40) to maintain clarity. The other problem with this system is that there are conflicting conventions of numbering the tones. Of course in the historical works where onset voicing is enough to mark yin and yang, you get other systems for marking ping, shang, qu and ru, which could almost work for some Wu dialects, but not quite.
I’ve grown a distaste for the western convention of calling them I/II/III/IV, A/B, which look like list items and such when alone, and are too clumsy to be marked on syllable transcriptions, as far as I’ve seen. I’ve started using circled numbers for the four classes and H and L for the register (koʔ④H, which might still be too clumsy to mark on transcriptions nicely, but I do it anyway, and I think it looks better.
[i just changed it for you. added <sup> to both. -kp]
Oops. Markup was stripped. The 40 is supposed to be superscript, and ④H is supposed to be subscript.
That’s interesting. But does ④H/ivA really help with clarity if you’re not already familiar with the tone system of any given dialect? It seems in my case you’re still having to refer back to some table to know the contour and so it wouldn’t really have anything to gain over marking 阳平 etc.
Right, it’s particularly helpful when trying to understand relationships among dialects or changes between Middle Chinese and a modern dialect. But it also comes in handy when you’re talking about sandhi, which is what I’m mostly looking at. I mark contours as superscript, and categories as subscript, marking both at the some time when both are relevant. And I’m using ④H instead of 阴去 because most of the people who are reading what I write don’t read Chinese.
Off topic, your site is fantastic. I get an “attack site” warning when I try to go there which may be why I’ve not really seen it before, though i feel like i knew the URL long ago. At any rate, it’s a good reminder that I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I think I’ll be spending the rest of my afternoon reading through all the old posts.
Thanks, though the good stuff there is just translations from Cao Zhiyun’s 南部吴语语音研究. It has a lot of interesting stuff in there. And yeah, a lot of that I don’t understand either.
What software is giving the attack warning? I wonder if it’s the host it’s on or something in the code.
This should give you the info: http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=74.222.134.170&hl=en-gb