You have to learn the tones as movements rather than ‘set’ tones… That is… You can’t learn 'This is 1st tone and it changes to 7th tone har har har '… I mean, you can’t learn the first tone as ‘high’; you have to learn it as ‘mid to high’
Some of them make lots of sense like:
Second tone: high to falling (your pitch can only fall if it’s high in the first place)
Third tone: falling to low (duh… your pitch falls, so now it’s low…)
Fifth tone: waving to mid (well, it’s before the end of the sentence, so there’s no time to elaborate on that ‘waving’ sound, you just make it mid tone)
You have to learn the tones as movements rather than ‘set’ tones… That is… You can’t learn 'This is 1st tone and it changes to 7th tone har har har '… I mean, you can’t learn the first tone as ‘high’; you have to learn it as ‘mid to high’
Some of them make lots of sense like:
Second tone: high to falling (your pitch can only fall if it’s high in the first place)
Third tone: falling to low (duh… your pitch falls, so now it’s low…)
Fifth tone: waving to mid (well, it’s before the end of the sentence, so there’s no time to elaborate on that ‘waving’ sound, you just make it mid tone)
Hmmm…[/quote]
I agree. But it does take a lot of practice to be able to do this. But then again, it takes a lot of practice to learn a new language, so I should just stop whining and get to it.
That said, here’s one more alternative for writing the tones: use numbers, and put the original tone in parentheses. This might be even more of a mess to look at, but it helps people who haven’t quite figured out the tones yet. For example:
ngao7(5) za2
Or reverse what’s in the parentheses if you like: ngao5(7) za2
This is what I’ve been using to enter Maryknoll vocab into Supermemo on my Palm. If we can get the tone marks straightened out for Sinister’s system, though, I might switch.
I forgot the mention, the one reason I really don’t like using numbers is that the Taiwanese tone numbers conflict with Mandarin. Even if you think you’ve mastered the fact that 2 in Taiwanese is falling tone and not rising tone, I bet there’s a measurable difference in your speed to process the Taiwanese 2, due to inerference from your representation of the Mandarin 2.
Sorry, that’s the Mad Scientist speaking. A little too nerdy…
If you have any ideas to improve the pinyin in this thread, I’ll change the first post. The point is for everyone to agree on the most accurate, understandable, and aesthetic way to post their ‘Taiwanese Words of the Day’.
Again, the first part with the chapter from Maryknoll is just to see how the syllabry looks aesthetically. Tempo Gain translated it a couple of posts down. It’s still pretty fvckin ugly :bravo: We’re looking for a new way to mark the seventh tone (in case we have to use dashes in words)… either that or skip dashes in words like:
to"baoa’
Can you tell that that’s made of three syllables, or do we need a dash? I think it’s OK without a dash.
I’ll change the first post to suit what everyone’s going to agree on for the best syllabry.
C’mon, you don’t think I’d have missed out on messing with tonal spelling in Taiwanese, do you?
I personally like the Church Romanization system, so my TOM (Tonally-Orthographic Minnan) system is based on it…
Taiyu Tonal Spelling
1, 8: ALL UPPER CASE
7, 4: all lower case
2: First Cap
5: lasT caP
3: lower’ case’ with’ apostrophe’
For the gross purposes of us foreigners IMHO you can view 1 and 8 as the same thing – they are both high; the only difference is the final p,t,k or glottal stop on the 8th tone. Ditto with 7 and 4. 2nd tone in Taiyu is falling, thus the first letter is capitalized; fifth tone is rising, hence the last letter is capitalized. But we run out of permutations here, so we (my friend Matt and I) ended up settling for adding an apostrophe’ to’ the’ end’ of’ third’ tone’ words’ like’ this’. (This was also because it’s easier to use on a cell phone – we used to SMS this way.)
Please note that since I focus on language learning, not writing systems as literature, this system is intended to write the phonetic form of the word – that is, to note down how a word is actually pronounced in speech, NOT in the dictionary (although youl could). That’s why the system doesn’t worry about distinguishing between 1/8, 7/4 etc…although actually it’s easy enough to do if you’ve got eyes and can note the final stops on the 4/8 tones.
Hey, Ironlady. Thanks for the TOP system. It’s really practical. But I think it’s best if we reserve the capital letters to the Mandarin. That makes the Taiwanese more distinguishable…
Uh…
So what what I mean to say is that capital letters are ugly.
I know the comma’s weird. But I’ve gotten used to it already. Just know to only look out for a period.
Two weird changes. Check them out on the first thread:
I think it’s weird to have a four-letter pronoun, so I thought I’d change the heavy ‘g’ and ‘b’ to…
‘y’ because it looks kind of like Greek gamma
‘v’ because it looks like the Taiwanese zhuyin for the same sound, and it’s a bilabial in Spanish, too.
Also, for Maryknoll’s weird ‘j’ sound (as in ‘Japan’- jit:bun’. ) Some people pronounce it like a ‘z’, some like an ‘l’, so how about ‘zl’?
Japan:
zlit:bun’
Today:
kina’zlit:
寫字:
xia’zli-
Hmmm… It might start looking like some weird Aztec/Polish/Vietnamese…
I don’t understand why Terry’s method is so disliked… It has the benefit of being very easy to read and is fast to write. Plus, it is easier to visualize when memorizing new words. Caps may be ugly, but as I understand it, the goal is to create an effective system, not an asthetic one.
Y’all have fun re-inventing the wheel, guys. Personally, Church Romanization works pretty darn well, it’s linguistically sound, and all I want is a way to write it with tones so I can SMS people to annoy them.
(of course Matt is prejudiced…he was one of the recipients of those SMSs, having the requisite twisted mind… )
It would be well if the system could:
a) have a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes or sounds (depending on your theoretical point of view and your uses for the system) and letters used to represent same;
b) make use only of easily-accessed letters, numbers, and symbols, to make it easy to use on computers, cell phones, etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Church Romanization ain’t bad…it does the above except for those pesky ch/chh distinctions and the nasal vowels. I think we used to add ~ after the nasal vowels?? I can’t remember. All I had to go on was a memo I had on one of my Palm devices, which was kind of sketchy.
[quote=“ironlady”]Y’all have fun re-inventing the wheel, guys. Personally, Church Romanization works pretty darn well, it’s linguistically sound, and all I want is a way to write it with tones so I can SMS people to annoy them.
…
Church Romanization ain’t bad…it does the above except for those pesky ch/chh distinctions and the nasal vowels. I think we used to add ~ after the nasal vowels?? I can’t remember. All I had to go on was a memo I had on one of my Palm devices, which was kind of sketchy.[/quote]
yeah, nothing too major wrong with Lomaji once you get used to it. for the nasal when printed they usually use a superscript n. I often saw a capital N when people had typed it up themselves.
I really hate it. I hate the way they write something really close to English d,b,g, as t,b,and k - reserving th, bh, and kh for the ‘real’ t, b and k sounds. I know the logic behind this - it’s because they’re not aspirated (or vice versa), but it’s just stupid if you ask me. I think something derived from Hanyu Pinyin would be much better, for foreign learners anyway, especially seeing as most foreign learners of Taiwanese are probably already familiar with HP. Also, I think there’s something wrong with the ‘ch’ and ‘chh’. You can;t seriously tell me that the ‘ch’ sounds in ‘gau5-cha2’ and ‘chiah8 pa8 boe7’ are the same can you? See, I’d write those as ‘gao zap’ and ‘jia ba bui’.
But to tell you the truth, my Taiwanese is nowhere near good enought ot argue this with confidence. Just think of it as a beginner’s take.
The problem is that in Minnan, in phonetic terms, you have three opposed stops, not just two. In English you only have to worry about voiced vs. voiceless (for example, t vs d); in Mandarin it’s basically aspirated vs. non-aspirated, and you can get away with making them voiced vs. voiceless (again, t vs. d) but in Taiwanese you have both voiced/voiceless and aspirated/nonaspirated (t’, t and d, more or less), which is why it’s trickier to Romanize in a way people “like”.
For me, any Romanization is OK as long as it doesn’t add a whole bunch of excess symbols, and as long as it attempts to maintain the relationship between segments and especially tones. (Well, that’s me.) Church Romanization does pretty well on that front – easy to see how ch and chh are related, no matter how ugly or unwieldy they are.
Church romanization is too hard to learn. You need a teacher to help you figure out, for example, that ‘s’ is pronounced as ‘x’ in front of ‘eng’ or ‘i’ and ‘chhi’ is different from ‘chha’ and all that…
ANYWAYS…
I had an epiphany today…
As far as I know, there are no nasalized 8th tones… They just don’t exist, do they? So I thought that for the 8th tone, we can double the final ‘h,p,t,k’. There will never be a double vowel before it, so it will be nice and aesthetic! That also frees up the colon, which I put on the seventh tone now… which frees up the dash, so we can use a dash if we feel it’s necessary (on a word like ‘student’, for example: hakk-xeng)
I changed the first post accordingly. I think it’s looking better and better by the day… I didn’t add dashes, because I think they’re unnecessary
I like ‘v’ for the super ‘b’ sound (I think that’s what linguists call an “aspirated voiced bilabial”? Ironlady??)
But I don’t really like the ‘y’ for the super ‘g’ sound (Would that be the aspirated voiced velar??)
I think it’s like this:
Taiwanese p/b/v (or, in church romanization: ph/p/b)
unvoiced unaspirated/ voiced unaspirated/ voiced aspirated)
Same with k/g/y (or, in church romanization: kh/k/g)
Is that it?
Maybe it won’t be so bad if we use capital B and G for the voiced aspirated consonants… Let me try… I think just a couple of capital letters looks pretty OK…
'… I mean, you can’t learn the first tone as ‘high’; you have to learn it as ‘mid to high’
way to post their ‘Taiwanese Words of the Day’.
IMHO you can view 1 and 8 as the same thing – they are both high; the only difference is the final p,t,k or glottal stop on the 8th tone. Ditto with 7 and 4. 2nd tone in Taiyu is falling, thus the first letter is capitalized; fifth tone is rising, hence the last letter is capitalized. But we run out of permutations here, so we (my friend Matt and I) ended up settling for adding an apostrophe’ to’ the’ end’ of’ third’ tone’ words’ like’ this’. (This was also because it’s easier to use on a cell phone – we used to SMS this way.)
these days an “l” is fine, no?