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Gwoyeu Romatzyh-xiao’erjin hybrid March 13 2010 2 comments
Posted on Saturday, March 13th, 2010 at 23:44. , comment feed
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There was an email I received recently, about which I posted, asking about tones and xiao’erjin. In the end, it got me thinking of Gwoyeu Romatzyh, the system of Romanisation created by YR Chao and Lin Yutang, a while before pinyin. In GR, all tones are marked in the spelling itself, so for example “hai” in all four tones would be spelled hai, hair, hae and hay. What about using the additional vowels used in the Uyghur variant of the Arabic script to include a bit of tonality into xiao’erjin? I’ve often thought the script (xrj) could use a bit fewer harakat (diacritics) and more long vowels for the sake of legibility and speed of writing. Why not have tones be included? Of course if you did away with diacritics then there’d be no reason not to use diacritics to mark tone as is done in pinyin and 注音符号. Who knows. Maybe xiao’erjin could make a comeback. Highly unlikely given the official status of pinyin and the pervasiveness of English education in China, but a guy can dream. 2 Responses to “Gwoyeu Romatzyh-xiao’erjin hybrid” Leave a Reply |
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April 19th, 2010 at 01:11
On a somewhat related note: Svetlana Rimsky-Korsakoff Dyer mentioned (in “Soviet Dungan kolkhozes…”, p. 12) that some Soviet Dungan textbooks used the Russian “soft sign” (ь) and “hard sign” (ъ), placed after vowels, to mark tones in Dungan.
The standard Dungan orthography (either Cyrillic or the older, Latin-based) does not mark tones, of course, nor does it make use of the Cyrillic hard and soft signs. But the use of these 2 characters in that GYR-like manner is strangely appropriate, I think. After all, they were born over a 1000 years ago to represent certain Old Slavic semivowels. For most of their history in those Slavic languages that retained them, they served to represent a shwa-like vowel (the hard sign in Bulgarian), or not a vowel at all (but rather the degree of palatalization of the preceding consonant and/or a hint for syllabification).
April 19th, 2010 at 01:17
Very interesting stuff. I’m not very familiar with how Cyrillic has been used for minority languages, though I know it’s been used for any number of languages belonging to former Soviet states or states with ties to the USSR.
Something I’ll definitely need to look in to.