Diacritical Tone Marks for the pın′yın′ Script

by zhang′ ju′ lıˇ

In a short essay in Chinese written in 1996, I proposed to mark the pinyin's tones with a set of diacritical marks. Later on I used superscript numerals as tone marks in my web pages because of their convenience for presentation. Diacritical tone marks are discussed in this essay.

None of the writing systems for major tonal languages, such as Thai and Vietnamese, mark tones with numerals. Instead, diacritics were invented and adopted. In the Thai writing, the tone marks used to be numerals from its own writing system. But later those graphs gradually evolved away from regular numerals and were developed into a set of symbols for marking the tones in the script only. In this essay I will test marking the tones of pinyin with following diacritics:

It is necessary to point out that placing superscript numerals or diacritics at the right upper-hand corner of the letter spelling has been employed for up to nearly a century and a half. The Wade-Giles system, which indicates the tone by placing the superscript numeral at the right upper-hand corner, was first published by Thomas Francis Wade in 1867, and later refined by Herbert Allen Gile and his son in 1912. Therefore, name of this system is Wade-Giles.

Bernhard Karlgren used diacritics at the right upper-hand corner to present alphabetic spellings for Chinese characters in 1949, if not earlier. Please click here to see a page from his work. China's own scheme, the hanˆ yuˇ pin′ yin′ fang′ anˆ (Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet), pinyin in short, was promulgated in 1958. Unfortunately, the optimal location for the tone marks in the designs by Wade-Giles and Karlgren was not adopted in the pinyin.

On the surface, Karlgren's graphs for tone marks are same as those in the pinyin. But there is a fundamental difference between these two systems. In Karlgren's transcript, modern Chinese continues to be treated as a monosyllabic language, but is a polysyllabic language in the pinyin.

Relationship between tonal syllables in Chinese, both classic and modern, is different from that in non-tonal languages. In terms of stress pattern, there is no polysyllabic word and compound word in Chinese. A unit of meaning consisting of more than one syllable is like a phrase or sentence in the non-tonal languages, because all the tonal syllables are evenly stressed.

In the pinyin script there are polysyllabic words and compound words, similar to those in the non-tonal languages. A set of spelling rules, to stipulate how to join syllables together into 'words' and space them in sentence, was created. Therefore, it is impossible to use the tone marking location by Wade-Giles and Karlgren together with the pinyin's spelling rules, which will prevent the syllables from joining together.

On the other hand, Chinese is a monosyllabic language, and it is not necessary to move Karlgren's diacritical mark from current location to the top of a letter, because there is a space between syllables anyway. It is convenient to place the tone marks on it. Karlgren's location has two merits. First, the tone mark is more visually striking. Located in a whole spce, its size can be adjusted for opitical display.

Secondly, it's important to unambiguously indicate the syllable borders in a tonal language, so the reader can easily indentify each syllable in its particular tone for correct tonal sound. The location for the tone in Karlgren's script fulfills well these two tasks. You can go to another article on this topic.

Examples of the pinyin with the diacritical tone marks in my proposal are presented in the following six boxes. Please note that the letter 'i' is also replaced by the dotless 'ı' as experiment:

Having been written in the ideographic script for more than three thousand years, Chinese has become an extremely homophonous language. A sound (tonal syllable) can represent up to dozens of morphemes that are distinguished from one another not by distinct sounds, but only by different ideographic written forms. The phonetic system of Chinese language has become substantially simplified. There were more than 3,000 distinct syllables in the standard language in the Tang Dynasty (618AD - 907AD). Nowadays there are only about 1,300 of them.

Therefore, the alphabetic writing in above boxes is far from being efficient in presenting the meanings, as does the ideographic script. In addition, when learning Chinese language, foreigners also like to know the semantic equivalents of their own languages. In order to achieve the desired effects, the text in Box IIIa is modified to Box IIIb, in which units of meaning are divided by the English punctuation mark for period (.), and the sentence end with the Chinese punctuation mark for period (。). It is expected that this type of writing will be able to help Chinese reader to parse the units of meaning, and the foreign learner to learn the language more efficiently.

At this point, we need start to diversify the language and writing by employing the three methods I discussed in another page, to transform the language from an ideographic one to a phonetic one. In the following box, the red spellings represent new but possible sounds intended to expand the language.

The content in Box IIIc is exactly same as those in Box IIIb, but with quite a few different spellings. The different spellings in IIIc do not represent Chinese characters, but are all possible sounds in the Chinese language. It is attempting to introduce more sounds into the language.

In the following Box IIId, all the word dividers are removed, and no word is in color.

When reading the text in above Box IIId, the reader can move the cursor to any syllable spelling. If it is not a stardard pinyin spelling, a small rectangle will appear containing the standard pinyin spelling. But it will be a standard pinyin spelling if no rectangle appears.

The rationale for the language expansion is that an adoption of a phonetic script suitable for the language will render all possible sounds in Chinese a phonemic spelling. New sounds can be taken in, to overcome the homophony of the language. Enrichment of the sound system will become natural development of the language.

A fatal mistake that the Chinese romanization movement has made this far is that only the sounds currently represented by the ideographic characters are taken into account for the phonetic writing, but not those legitimate and possible sounds having no ideographic written form. All possible sounds will have a written form in the phonetic writing. In other words, the language in phonetic writing has more sounds than that in ideographic writing. Or the corpus of sounds in the phonetic language is larger than that in the ideographic language.

It's worth mentioning that the proposed language expansion will make current standard language another dialect, same as the Canton, Wu and others. The new language will be defined by the phonetic writing. The dialects will continue to speak what they are used to, but gradually change to accommodate the new criterion.

Copyright © 2011 by zhang′ju′lıˇ.