#romanizations

[regnigt]

My Confused Gintama Spelling

Generally with romanized Japanese names I'm not too fond of the doubled consonants or "ou" for long "o". In fics I'll go with macroned long O these days to be correct, or occasionally a circumflexed ô when I feel lazy. I've kept to this when writing Gintama as well - at least in the final drafts.

But just when making short posts or chatting or what not, I don't feel like being too rigid about it anymore. I'll switch between single consonants and the doubled/ou spelling for some names when the latter is fannish convention and for whatever reason doesn't bother me too much. So like, if I'm writing a fic it will be "Jôi war" and "Jôishishi" (or with macron instead of the circonflex), but more casually it's "Joui war", "Joui Four" and "Jouishishi" in text and Tumblr tags. But also "Kondo" and "Shoyo", again both in text and tags. A song title like "Tougenkyou Alien" seems to be spelled mostly like that most all over, so that's how I spell it, too.

And then there's individual characters where it goes back and forth. I'll write Okita's first name as "Sōgo" or "Sôgo" in a fic, "Sougo" casually, and his tumblr tag is "sogo okita"... Not much order to it at all. But as long as people get who and what I'm talking about, I don't care so much now.

[tcchinese]

This is a small fast way to indicate tones from the Middle Chinese perspective I’ve come up with. It’s essentially a form of Ball’s/Eitel’s tone marks that could be typed without diacritics and may be used in IRC, on social media and forums where the original characters aren’t supported.

.X ‘X X’ X. ..X “X X” X..

For aesthetics, the umlaut (¨) may be used as opposed to the double quotes, and to show the Yue Chinese “mid entering” tone, the Japanese period (。) may be used (or Chinese, if that one is more convenient for the user).

[tcchinese]

Basic summary of The Tonal Spelling of Cantonese

Article: The Tonal Spelling of Cantonese (1958) From: T‘oung Pao Article by: Søren Egerod

The article is a review of an earlier article, “The Transcription of Cantonese”, written by Tor Ulving, whose work reviewed Chinese transcriptions and was most critical of Chao’s systems.

The first point Egerod addressed is that Ulving claimed that “u” stood for many vowels, though Ulving mentioned that some are mere mistakes (which I deduced to be based off of Wade-Giles since Ulving criticized that [u] has been written as <huen> when Egerod wrote that it stood for “[χwən]”). Another point is, Ulving listed [ʊ] (though he writes it as “ong”) as one of the inconsistencies, as Chao did not write it with a <u>, while Egerod responded that the sound is in fact [o]. This comes down in the end to different analyses of the same sound.

As for Chao’s Cantonese Romanization, Ulving claimed that Chao’s treatments of the tones were not faithful to Cantonese phonology and were based off of their sounds in Ancient Chinese, when Egerod responded that the terms “bheng, zheug, hoy and yap” are in fact the names used by those who study Chinese dialectology.

The next point. Again (or perhaps consequently), Ulving placed too much emphasis on the actual tones, and criticized that a trailing -h in Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR) represented a falling tone in Mandarin, and was used to represent a tone that wasn’t falling in Cantonese, and said that a person would need “superhuman concentration” to adjust to such a difference. Egerod rightfully points out that they are tonal cognates and that a similar spelling might even help people recognize that the words in fact have the same meaning in the National Language as well as Cantonese.

Though in the end, Egerod wrote that both Chao’s and Barnett’s systems were used with success and that while Egerod has found some problems with Barnett’s system, it was not horrible. This though possibly means Barnett had a system in use that wasn’t Barnett-Chao, but there wasn’t really much description given in the article.

[tcchinese]

We know that many Romanizations like McCune-Reischauer, Eitel and Ball used an aspiration mark inspired by the Greek “rough breathing mark” to denote aspiration. However, what if a Japanese Romanization used the dakuten (濁點) as basis and used a “voicing mark”? Here’s what it would probably look like:

Wara nink”you ni k”ossun-kuk”i

Shiranai wa sonna mahou Omoi wa tsutaetara kowarechau Anata to wa chik”au kara Hito no kokoro mat”e kantan ni nusumanait”e 

Shitteru wa sonna himitsu Itsu t”e mo mune no naka sakent”eru Anata to wa chik”au kara Hito no kokoro mat”e kantan ni nusumanait”e 

Note: the “p row” would be written as <h°>.

[tcchinese]

TCC Romanization that uses <h> after non-sonorants solely for aspiration (unlikely to become the official standard). The digraph <mh> may further be replaced.

p ph b m f v mh t th d n l tr trh dr nr k kh g ng x ğ w ts tsh dz s z tś tśh dź ń ś ź y

aa a e ê i (o) u

[tcchinese]

Andrew Parke has brought me to the attention that the “most popular” Cantonese input method is one that uses the “Hong Kong texting Romanization”. I have described it as “English-and-pinyin-biased Bastardized Eitel”. The use of “bastardized” is “the correct term, even if sounds vaguely offensive” according to pinyin.info to describe Wade-Giles when used without any diacritics. I will then choose to follow this and use the term to refer to the form of McCune-Reischauer (a Korean Romanization) and other forms of Cantonese Romanizations with the diacritics (with perhaps an emphasis on aspiration). This is because, as I have stated in previous posts, that many Hong Kongers are only exposed to Eitel, but without diacritics, as the only form of Cantonese Romanization. However, they also received a considerable amount of input from pinyin and English, thus when they text others, a lot of Hong Kongers use this form of Eitel Romanization with English and pinyin biases put in, without making the tonal and vowel quality distinctions (aspiration distinction may be made through using the voicing of the initial).

[tcchinese]

Aspiration mark template

p ̔a - rough breathing, from the top-right picture on its Wikipedia article

p῾a - (preferred, more faithful to the original Romanizations that used this mark) under the "Usage" section

p‘a - (looks better with the fonts taken into account) single open quote (not closing quote)