I recently received am email asking a simple but not unimportant question about the xiao’erjin system of transliteration. From the email:

How are you supposed to represent tones in Xiao’erjing? It doesn’t seem like you can. Wouldn’t that make Xiao’erjing an extremely unsatisfactory way of writing Chinese, if you can’t even express fully how it sounds?

I’d like to answer with a little more detail here than I did in my emailed response to the sender.

Basically, yes, tones aren’t marked in xiao’erjin (from here on out referred to as “xrj”). The one exception to this is that there is a letter to represent /s/ when beginning a syllable in the entering tones (阳入, 阴入). So in a sense it’s not really marking tone so much as the fact that the syllable ends in a stop of some sort. This is still the case in Cantonese and Wu, however Mandarin has lost the entering tone. So really, for modern Mandarin, this particular letter would not be used.

If it were, it would look a little like this:
ښ
without the lower dot, that is.

That got me thinking of ways you could do tones in xrj that wouldn’t cause legibility issues. It’s already so diacritic heavy that adding another little dash to mark a second tone would be a bit of overkill.

But probably for most people using xrj when it was still in use, a lack of tones was probably not such a big deal. Context would have been a great help, and even if tones were included, this was well before Modern Standard Mandarin. And since xrj was itself never really standardised, for all we know some uses did have a way to mark tone.

I think mostly it wasn’t such a major issue. That said, expect a future post that offers a possible solution.