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Writing prescription of Chinese herbal medicine in full PinYin can be an unpleasant experience. Following is such one consisting of only few herbs.
But there are different ways to make the writing simpler. First of all, we can simplify the herb names by removing their tone marks. Chinese is a tonal language. There are four different tones. Each syllable carries a tone. In each syllable, the phonemes are spelling elements, and the tone is non-spelling element. In reading, the reader has to locate the syllable boundary at both ends to associate it with a particular tone.
Therefore, syllable boundaries in the alphabetic writing for Chinese must be explicit. In above square, the superscript tone marks are placed at the right-hand upper corner, to indicate both the tone and syllable boundary. In order to mark the syllable boundaries in the writing without tone marks, following rule will be observed: when a term consisting of two or more syllables, the first letter of each syllable is written in capital, while the other letters in lowercase.
If the circle of Chinese medical professionals reaches agreement on the standard acronyms, this herbal recipe can be further simplified as:
Which way to write the prescription is the decision of individual doctor. But one thing is certain: introducing PinYin writing into the Chinese herbal medicine will bring convenience and necessary simplification to the field, thus help its advance in the long run.
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