Tonally Orthographic Pinyin

By Confused Laowai | Date: January 12th, 2012 | Category: Language

I found out this really cool way to write Pinyin while browsing the Chinese Stack Exchange (ps. which you guys must join!). It’s called Tonally Orthographic Pinyin. Its main aim is to make tone marks redundant. The creator said this:

The TOP system is redundantly marked for tones: with colors, with capital and small letters, and with the standard Hanyu Pinyin tone marks.

So, where you would get “Nǐ huì shuō yīngwén ma?” in TOP it would be “nǐ Huì SHUŌ YĪNGwéN ma*?”

Now at first it might seem a bit messy and crazy. All over the place. BUT, I think this is clever idea to some extent. I might not be a fan of the redundancy, but the capital letters is so genius actually. In fact, you could write Pinyin without tone marks, without colors, with numbers just by capitalization!

Take that above example: ”Nǐ huì shuō yīngwén ma?”

This would be: “ni Hui SHUO YINGweN ma*? (I marked the neutral tone with a asterisk).

This is useful, because it allows conveying tone without any other additional markings/colors, but in facts takes traits of normal English/Alphabetic Orthographic behaviour and utilizes that. This means, that I could also write this using a normal keyboard or on my phone that does not support Chinese characters (or Pinyin).

Another benefit is the fact that according to the creator, capitalization creates a mnemonic effect for tones levels.

  • First tone is “high”, thus all is capitalized: SHUO
  • Second tone is “going up”, this the last letter is capitalized: weN
  • Third tone is “low”, this nothing is capitalized: ni
  • Fourth tone is “going down”, thus the first letter is capitalized: Hui

Not everyone will like this, and I’ve had my gripes with Pinyin before, but this is an interesting adaptation (I won’t say solution) to reading tones in an alphabetic script.

What do you think?

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  • Thomas

    What a great system, but what about syllables that don’t have the required two letters? Like: a and e?

    And what if your colourblind?

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    Good points. That’s probably when the redundancy kicks, like color and tone marks. Same for being color blind.

  • http://lingomi.com/blog Steven Daniels

    Sort of like a poor-man’s Gwoyeu Romatzyh.

    I don’t think you should call it pinyin though.
    It’s breaks every rule of pinyin.

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    Gwoyeu Romatzyh confused me a lot, but maybe because I haven’t really at it that much.

    Yes, Tonally Orthographic Pinyin is not technically Pinyin, but I just like the idea of using capitalization as a orthographic tonal feature.

  • http://lookoutknockhead.com Mike Newton

    Interesting system.

    To be perfectly honest, I think that in this case it’s sort of six to one, half-dozen to the other.  In both systems you have visual cues which, at a glance, clearly indicate the pronunciation of any given word.  A stroke in favor of this TOP system is that you don’t have to focus on small tone markers, but rather you can look instead for capital letters.

    For my part, I feel inclined to stick with the existing system–but only because it’s what I know and am comfortable with.

    Good find Niel.  Also, I love Chinese Stack Exchange!

    Mike

  • Robert Mollitor

    I’m still not used to reading or entering pinyin in general, but I particularly have a hard time with the easy-to-type pinyin with numbers (Ni3 hui4 shuo1 ying1wen2 ma?).  The digits look too much like content and I don’t like how they come after the syllable.

    A system I’ve been thinking about (but I can’t say I’ve done anything with it) uses symbol prefixes instead of numeric suffixes (~Ni !hui #shuo #ying?wen ma?).  The symbols are ‘#’ for first tone (since I consider this the musical tone), ‘?’ for second tone (rising question tone), ‘~’ for third tone (broken tone), and ‘!’ for fourth tone (falling imperative tone), with nothing for the neutral tone.  I think putting them before the syllable makes sense because I want to know the tone before I start to sound out the letters and because they shouldn’t interfere with the true punctuation.

    Here’s an extended example:

        Chū dàshuǐ de shíhou, bù néng dào wàimiàn qù wánr,    bǎ wǒ mènhuài le. Dàshuǐ guòhòu, wǒ děngbují de    pǎodào xuéxiào qù zhǎo wǒ d hǎo péngyou Cài    Shùyùn.    #Chu !da~shui de ?shihou !bu ?neng !dao !wai!mian !qu ?wanr,    ~ba ~wo !men!huai le.  !Da~shui !guo!hou, ~wo ~dengbu?ji de    ~pao!dao ?xue!xiao !qu ~zhao ~wo de ~hao ?pengyou !Cai    !Shu!yun.

  • http://niel.delarouviere.com NielDLR

    Hi Robert,

    what an interesting method you thought there. I quite like the idea of putting the tone marks infront of the word. The only problem that I can see arise with you method is the potential confusion that could occur with existing sentence punctuation. But I like your choice of symbols! Cleverly thought of.

  • ichineseflashcards

    May I suggest http://www.ichineseflashcards.com (helps you learn Chinese (Mandarin) faster by using flashcards with pictures), thanks