Typing tones in mupin (Cyrillic) transcription

[Pall]

It's just for your information. It's possible to type tone marks in mupin transcription, based on Russian Cyrillic, with the help of the macros function in MsWord. Tone marks are typed with a combination of keys right after the letter, over wich they should be. The third tone is   ̊ in order not to confuse with the Russian letter 'й'. 

 

[Pall]

(Post is not ready, I removed it and will return tomorrow)

 

[Pall]

I've improved the mupin. It wasn't convenient that Russian letter 'в' used in it sounds like English 'v', not 'w'. Because of that you have to always remember that 'в' should be pronounced more like English 'w'. I replaced 'в' with the letter 'ԝ'. It's a Cyrillic letter, too, though not used in modern Russian, Unicode 051C,051D. However, it doesn't matter, it can be thought of as Litin as it's almost the same. Moreover, I believe, any letters can be used if it improves the perception of the transcription. But in this case one replacement is enough, the rest of mupin works very good. 

 

The question may arise, why do I need mupin, if the pinyin perfectly conveys all the sounds. This is because I take a special approach to acquiring speaking skills. In my opinion, developing conversational skills is a key element in mastering all other aspects of the language, even if it is Chinese. And this can be achieved not only through speaking practice with a native speaker or teacher, but also through the special study of simple texts and dialogues. What am I doing now. I take a collection of stories written for children. I divide each story into small logical chunks, sentences, or parts of sentences. Then I take 2-4 sentences and retype them twice. The first time I print every odd piece in transcription and every even one in Russian interlinear, word by word, that is, in place of each Chinese word, there is a corresponding Russian. Thanks to the flexibility of Russian, in which almost any word order is possible without changing the meaning, this is possible. The second time, on the contrary, odd parts are given in Russian interlinear, and even ones in transcription. Since Russian is used, it is better to use transcription based on Russian letters so that there are no additional difficulties with switching from one alphabet to another. When a story is retyped in this mode I begin to read it aloud trying to say all in Mandarin, both Russian interlinear and transcription chunks. 
 

 

[erlenwein]

Why not Палладий though? I know there's a stage (usually two months into learning Chinese) where everyone feels the need to invent their own pinyin/palladius system, but I'm interested in your reasoning for that. 

And if you want phonetic clarity - there's IPA and zhuyin for your convenience. Your system is just as arbitrary as all other ones. 

[Pall]

2 hours ago, erlenwein said:

Why not Палладий though? I know there's a stage (usually two months into learning Chinese) where everyone feels the need to invent their own pinyin/palladius system, but I'm interested in your reasoning for that. 

And if you want phonetic clarity - there's IPA and zhuyin for your convenience. Your system is just as arbitrary as all other ones.

Палладий was relatively good before pinyin was introduced. But now it is clearly losing to pinyin. In Russia today, Палладий transcription is practically not used, dictionaries with it are not published any more, etc. There is only an official transcription based on Палладий, which is used mainly for the transliteration of geographical and human names. But it is inconvenient in learning Chinese. 
I have been studying Chinese for more than two years now, but completely on my own. In theory, I must already do without reading in transcription at all, and if we are talking about reading, then this is so. However, in this case, I found a way to develop speech skills not by talking with someone, but by reading simple texts, for teenagers, dialogues, etc. in a special way. The procedure is described above, texts are devided into small chunks, odd chunks come in transcription while even ones in Russian interlinear, and on the contrary.  Russian is very suitable for such interlinear, since it's possible to put Russian words exactly to the places of corresponding Mandarin words. 
But since it is Russian that is used, it turned out to be convenient to use the transcription based on the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, so as not to spend additional efforts on switching to another alphabet. So, I use the Russian-language transcription, but not the Pallady system, but the mupin instead, which appeared only about 10 years ago. It conveys the sounds of Chinese as well as pinyin. I was only dissatisfied with the use of the Russian "в", which is too far from sounding like 'w'. So I replaced this single letter and everything became very convenient.

[Pall]

3 hours ago, erlenwein said:

Why not Палладий though?

Mupin is between Pallady and pinyin, it combines the best features of both. If you know Russian, compare this. For example, Pallady: xiu — сю ,   xu — сюй. Mupin is xiu – сю ,    xu – сьу . Russian soft 'c' is equivalent of 'x' in pinyin. In 'сю'   the 'c' is soft, because 'ю' is transcribed as [iu]. In 'сьу' softness of 'c' is shown with the "soft sympol" 'ь'. Pallady: yong — юн, mupin: 
yong – йонъ (almost a copy of pinyin, just letters are Russian equvalent). Mupin is easily convertable to pinyin and back.

[Pall]

On 7/5/2021 at 5:33 PM, erlenwein said:

everyone feels the need to invent their own pinyin/palladius system

You're right, though, not worth changing Russian 'в' for 'w', I should not invent my own version of mupin. Indeed, in pinyin, for example, 'z' sounds  like 'th' does in English, not just [z],so you just have to remember it. In the same way, you need to remember that 'в' is not similar to 'v', but 'w' instead.

[Pall]

Francly speaking, pinyin is less similar to English than mupin to Russian. In pinyin 'x', 'q', 'zh' are just sympols, because in English these letters/combinations sound quite differently. Further, 'j', 'z', 'ch', '-ian' in "tian", "bian", etc., '-ong' in "zhong", "gong", etc., '-uan' in "yuan", "luan", etc., '-ui' in 'dui', 'kui', etc., sound like in English, but with a great deal of approximation. In mupin there are no letters that would be just symbols, all sound either very similarly to Russian or with some approximation. So, someone, who know how Russian letters are pronounced, would be able to read text in mupin very close to Mandarin, the only serious obstical is 'в' for 'w' in pinyin. It's not surprising, though, since Russian is pronounced as it's written, with minor alteration like 'a' instead of 'o' if letter "o" is not under stress or making voiced consonants voicless in the end of words and in some other cases (sounding 't' instead of 'd', 'h' instead of 'g', 'p' instead of 'b').
At the same time 80% of Russian alphabet is direct anologue of corresponding English letters like A - A, B - Б, D - Д, etc.

[Pall]

By the way, I've developed a so-called Romanized Russian alphabet. It's not just a variant of transliteration. There are many of them, contradicting to one another, while this one is rather a parallel alphabet similar to the situation with two Serbian alphabets. I'm going to promote it to close the gap between Russian and Latin based languages. It's on the basis of English. However, six letters are left Cyrillic - these are the only difficult cases for a foreigner to master Russian as to reading letters, and it's better to leave these letters in their original form. They're three diphtongs, Ээ, soft symbol Ьь and Щщ. Russian diphtongs can be transcribed basically with adding "i" in the beginning, however it's very rearly done in transliteration for some unknown reason: Юю - [iu], Яя - [ia], Ёё - [io]. Russian Ee is also a diphtong, it's pronounced as [ie]. But in the Romanized Russian the Russian 'Ee' is given as English 'Ee' for symplification. In mupin where there is English 'Ee' in pinyin the Russian Ээ is used instead, because it is that letter that sounds similarly. In the Romanized Russian the Russian Ээ is left as Ээ unchanged. Щщ is just 'shch', but it's not convenient to use four letters to express a single Russian sound. All consonants that come before diphtongs, Ии (analogue of English 'Ii') or soft symbol Ьь are softened. Maybe this can be helpful to understand mupin. Unfortunately it's not present in internet because of its rear use, but I found where it's use can be very effective, described in the above posts. There is only an article in Russian Wikipedia on mupin with some general discription. I think I should place it somewhere in the Internet, then I'll give a link to all here. Maybe it can be helpful. 

Romanized_Russian.docx