Jianiyin: pseudo-phonetic romanization system

[chalimac]

What about quan, xuan and juan? In any case, these are all actually -üan, and the "a" is different from the "a" in duan or guan.

I didn't touch those in the first place.

[chalimac]

I have updated the system and the conversion tool and credited imron and renzhe in the documentation.

Now the first line of 狂人日记 stands as:

mǒu jūn kuēnzhòng ,jīn yǐn txí míng ,jiē yú xīrì tzài zhōngxué shí liáng yǒu ;fēn gé duōnién ,xiāoxi jièn txuè

[chalimac]

UPDATE 2

- Reverted tz back to z. I realized the resulting text had too many words beginning with t. It was confusing rather than helpful.

- New tool to reverse-convert from jianiyin to pinyin.

[Hofmann]

How about writing [tɕ] as dx? Then you can use j for (with no initial), and then y for [y]. Much cleaner, I think.

[chalimac]

Hofmann,

It would make sense but it departs too far from pinyin. My idea is that someone trained in pinyin could read this system without much adjustment. This is why it is conservative with initials but fully develops the vocalic groups. Changing two more initials will be too much of an overhaul, as I realized with the z > tz change I had to revert.

[Lu]

I'm not a big supporter of yet another romanization system, but the discussion here is very interesting.

One other thing: you write 'mǒu jūn kuēnzhòng ,jīn yǐn txí míng ,jiē yú xīrì tzài zhōngxué shí liáng yǒu ;fēn gé duōnién ,xiāoxi jièn txuè', is there a reason that the punctuation has a space before instead of after it?

[chalimac]

UPDATE

Added tonal spelling version.

In an attempt at reducing the number of diacritic marks in pinyin, I revisited Gwoyeu Romatzyh's idea of tonal spelling and applied it to the 3rd tone:

• Third tone is spelled as doubled vowels.
  
• Second and fourth tones are represented by accents.
  
• First tone and neutral tone are unmarked.
  

Now the resulting text has only open and close accents like languages such as french or catalan. Sample text.

is there a reason that the punctuation has a space before instead of after it?

No. It's a byproduct of converting the chinese period.

[renzhe]

First tone and neutral tone are unmarked.

This could lead to problems.

This not only makes your system non-phonetic (as there is ambiguity in pronunciation that you have to resolve using context), but can also lead to different words (pronounced differently) being written the same way.

Think dong1xi1 vs. dong1xi

[chalimac]

Think dong1xi1 vs. dong1xi

I am aware it loses information, that is why I made it optional. I have been thinking over ways to mark the neutral tone without using diacritics to no avail. Any idea?

As a trade-off, for my own studies the tonal version really helps me to remember better the tones, specially the 3rd tone. Less information, but presented in a less cluttered fashion.

[chrix]

Leaving the first tone unmarked and marking the neutral tone reminds me of 注音 Why not put a period before a neutral tone, like dong.xi, fáng.zi ?

[Hofmann]

Why avoid the macron?