User:Reactionfrontes/Romanization

Yale romanization

My Universal Romanization of Chinese languages.

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Romanization
Mandarin

Bb Pp Mm Ff Vv Dd Tt Nn Ll Gg Kk Ññ Hh Jj Qq Ģģ Šš Zz Cc Xx Rr Źź Žž Şş Ii Uu Üü Aa Oo Ee Àà Íí Ǎǎ Ąą Öö Āā Ûû Åå Ŏŏ Ũũ Ĩĩ

Wu Dialects:

Yy=zshrzshz Ää=au Ãã=aeh

Yue:

Xiang:

Division into Categories
Initials:

Bb Pp Mm Ff Vv Dd Tt Nn Ll Gg Kk Ññ Hh Jj Qq Ģģ Šš Zz Cc Xx Rr Źź Žž Şş

Mids:

Ii Uu Üü

Finals:

Aa Oo Ee Àà Íí Ǎǎ Ąą Öö Āā Ûû Åå Ŏŏ Ũũ Ĩĩ Yy Ää Ãã

Tones in Shanghainese
The Shanghainese tone system is simpler than that of other Wu dialects. However, traditional descriptions use the customary Chinese tone classification, with five named tones in this case: The term yang shu represents a conflation of the yang registers of the historical ping, shang, and qu tones. The conditioning factors which led to the yin-yang split still exist in Shanghainese, as they do in other Wu dialects: Yang tones are only found with voiced initials, while the yin tones are only found with voiceless initials. The ru tones are abrupt, and describe those rimes which end in a glottal stop. That is, both the yin-yang distinction and the ru tones are allophonic (dependent on syllabic structure); the Shanghai dialect has only a two-way phonemic tone contrast, falling vs rising, and then only in open syllables with voiceless initials. It will be seen next that this tone contrast actually applies to the phonological word, not to the syllable: No matter how many syllables there are in a word, there can only be a two-way contrast, and then only if the first syllable is open and has a voiceless initial.

Tone sandhi and the case for word-level tone
In polysyllabic words or set phrases (phonological words), all syllables after the first lose their original tone and are pronounced with a high or low tone, depending on the tone of the first syllable, as shown in the table below. (That is, they take "neutral" tones as in many Mandarin words.) The first syllable is also modified (to some extent its tone spreads across to the following syllable), but it does not lose the tonal distinctions it may have.

If the first syllable is open and with a voiceless initial, the word will have a high pitch on either the first or second syllable, depending on whether the first syllable would have had a falling or rising tone when spoken alone. If the first syllable in closed and with a voiced initial, the last syllable of the word will have a high pitch. In all other cases, the second syllable will have a high pitch. The other syllables will have predictable mid or low pitches. That is, there are three tone patterns, only two of which are contrastive.

Note: H = relative high pitch; L = relative low pitch.

These patterns are quite similar to Japanese pitch accent. Tone sandhi of polysyllabic compounds in the Shanghai dialect has attracted the interest of many scholars, who had previously given only careful consideration to the tone of the monosyllable while trying to describe the rules of tone sandhi for polysyllabic compounds.