Putunghwa Xinpinjin - new Chinese transliteration I created

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

Purpose:

Anybody who's studied either the standard Hanyu Pinyin or the older translit system knows that they are awfully bad at doing their job of transliterating. For example, Hanyu Pinyin's syllable coda system is very confusing:

/-ian/ is [-jen] but /-an/ is [-an]
/di/ is [ti] but /si/ is [sz]
/ěr/ is [er] with 3rd tone but /èr/ is [ar] with fourth tone.
and so on...

A transliteration system should be more consistent and easy to learn than this mess! Therefore I was motivated to create 普通话新拼音 or autonymed, Putunghwa Xinpinjin.


Important features:

1. Digraphs are used exclusively for affricates
2. No tone diacritics used
3. One-to-one correspondence with broadly transcribed IPA
4. No special characters


Conversion from Hanyu Pinyin

Since IPA is slow to type out and most Chinese speakers are familiar with Hanyu Pinyin, here is a conversion table:

Vowels
-u (i.e. du, mu, lu, pu) -> -u
yu, yu- (i.e. yu, yue) -> ü, ü-
-ong (i.e. dong, tong) -> -ung
[s/z/c/sh/zh/ch]i -> -z
-o (i.e. duo, luo, wo; IPA [ɤ]) -> -y
-ou (i.e. dou) -> -yw

Medial glides
-i- (i.e. die) -> -j-
-u- (i.e. duo) -> -w-
-ü- (i.e. lüe) -> -ü-

Stops
All unchanged from Pinyin

Initial glides
y- (i.e. ya) -> j-
yu- (i.e. yue) -> jü-

Fricatives & Affricates
sh -> c
zh -> dc
ch -> tc
s -> s
z -> ds
c -> ts
x -> x
j -> dx
q -> tx

Tones
Notated with superscripts

All diphthongs are notated Na'vi style  


Example:

Pu³ tung¹ hwa⁴ xin¹ pin¹ jin¹ cz⁴ ji² gy⁴ fey¹ tcang² haw³ dy⁰ xin¹ xi⁴ tung³, jin¹ wey² ta¹ bu² xjang⁴ han⁴ jü³ pin¹ jin¹ na⁴ jang⁴ bu⁴ dcwyn³ txüe⁴.

[pukapa nari]

Kaltxì ma Uniltìrantokx te Skxawng  ...

There are many translit systems for Chinese ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese
I started learning Chinese with Hanyu-Pinyin too, and it works quite well ...

If you create your own translit systems, it depends on your mother tongue,
how you will write it ... (this is also a reason, why there are so many translit
systems). If I do it in German, it would look very different to yours, and you
would be confused by it, as I'm confused, reading your system ...

I accept the Pinyin, for it is created by chinese people themselves and not
by some foreigner like many other translit systems ...
And I also accept it's irregularities, 'cause they are countable in Chinese language.
After all you have such in any language ... even in English !!!

e.g.: why is "car" = "kar", but is "man" = "män" ...
or the word marmalade which sounds to me as marmeleyd ...

Ok, that also depends on my German background ... but it's just an example
for the existance of irregularities in (nearly?) every language ...

So if you love to create your own new chinese translit system ...
随便你 ( feel free to do so )
But don't be dissapointed, if only a few people will use it ...


E. a.