Talk:Pinyin

I accept the general application of pinyin romanization, and I appreciate the alternative numerical way of interpreting tonalities. Still it seems to me that it would be more appropriate to show the tone numbers as superscripts. Thus we would have "pin¹" instead of "pin1" Comments? Eclecticology

No objection except several considerations. 1. superscripts are harder to type. 2. superscripts may make the pin yin unsearchable. e.g. it is easier to search "pin1 yin1" than the alternative. The in-line notation has been widely accepted in plain text medium before markup languages were widely used.

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The pronunciation guide seems to confuse "unaspirated" with "voiced", for example in saying that z represents unaspirated c. Can someone who knows mandarin confirm this?

I don't actually know Mandarin, but the description in the text accords everything I've heard about it, and with the Pinyin <-> IPA pronunciation guide in the back of my Chinese-English dictionary: z = [ts] c = [ts'] So far as I am aware, Mandarin consonants have no voiced/unvoiced distinctions. --Brion 06:22 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)

• I speak a fair bit of Mandarin, and the description sounds right to me -- prat

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I can't read any of the pinyin? Why? Vera Cruz

Are you using Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows? Try one of the items from the View/Encoding/More/Chinese* (Traditional or Simplified) menu. This should prompt you to install a language pack. Alternatively, you can download the fonts directly from Microsoft. If you are using a different Web browser or Operating System, you may need to install fonts manually. You need a Unicode Font with the Chinese code pages.

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Removed this section about using pinyin sounds being on the right track. The paragraph doesn't sound encyclopedic, and it's somewhat misleading. Especially without tones, a person who just pronounced pinyin to English pronounciations would by mostly incomprehsible.

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Capitalization

A question: Should we use "Pinyin" or "pinyin" (i.e. capitalize the first letter or not)? I have always thought "Pinyin" was the correct spelling, as it's a name of a Romanization system, but now that I see most people seem to write "pinyin" I'm not so certain anymore.

 - Wintran 11:31 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)

• I second the lowercase idea. I've always used 'pinyin', and it's not a proper noun as far as I can ascertain! -- prat

Merriam-Wesbter accepts both, OED lists it as uppercase and offers no explanation.

The name can be considered as:

1. Abbreviation of the document = uppercase.
2. A common method = lowercase, but in this case, it can literally can hence theoretically refers to all alphabet spelling systems, Latin or Cyrillic.

--Menchi 00:32 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Tone mark or number

So the numbers correspond to the tones otherwise indicated by diacritical marks? -- User:Smack, 00:26 2003-6-20

Yes, # are easy to type, diacritics ain't so. I can only type à and á have must copy-and-paste the other two. --Menchi 00:28 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)