Tomsima Posted February 28, 2021 at 08:12 PM Report Share Posted February 28, 2021 at 08:12 PM pinyin is great for its wide usage, I love bopomofo for its easier to understand phonetic approach and general aesthetics, but now it's time for me to finally get involved in gwoyeu romatzyh, because I just think the idea of encoding the tones sounds great. Also I've just got my hands on a copy of A Grammar of Spoken Chinese by 赵元任 aka Yuen Ren Chao, and want to make full use of the book. So here's the question - is there any way to get GR as the pronunciation for all dictionaries across pleco? Also anyone here in the forums currently able to use this system? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikelove Posted March 3, 2021 at 05:17 AM Report Share Posted March 3, 2021 at 05:17 AM Not supported at the moment, no - best you could do would be to create some flashcards or user dictionary entries with @ at the start of their pinyin fields followed by the GR romanization (the @ would prevent it from trying to parse them as Pinyin). No plans to add built-in GR support in 4.0 either, but since you can plug in your own romanization systems (c.f. Quacking Pinyin) it should be possible to add your own support for GR assuming we don't change our minds and build it in. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tomsima Posted March 4, 2021 at 07:54 PM Author Report Share Posted March 4, 2021 at 07:54 PM Thanks for the reply Mike. I've gone ahead and imported the CEDICT GR user dictionary as detailed on a pleco forums post from back in 2010, which is a good-ish work around. But the ability to plug in your own romanisation system would be really amazing - do I take it this is a pleco 4.0 feature only, or is this something i've yet to discover about the current release? Also, am I correct in thinking there is still no way to switch off the pinyin autoconvert on flashcards? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikelove Posted March 4, 2021 at 09:43 PM Report Share Posted March 4, 2021 at 09:43 PM 4.0 only. No way to switch off pinyin autoconvert systemwide, but as I said, if you insert a @ at the start of the pinyin field that will cause it to output the subsequent text verbatim rather than parsing it as pinyin. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anonymoose Posted March 4, 2021 at 10:01 PM Report Share Posted March 4, 2021 at 10:01 PM On 2/28/2021 at 8:12 PM, Tomsima said: but now it's time for me to finally get involved in gwoyeu romatzyh, because I just think the idea of encoding the tones sounds great But pinyin, when written fully, has the tones encoded as diacritics. The advantage of pinyin, in my opinion, is that it is much easier on the eye than romanisations that use dummy letters to represent tones. The only advantage of a system such as gwoyeu romatzyh is that it's easier to type out on a keyboard, but how often do you need to type out a romanisation with tones anyway? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roddy Posted March 4, 2021 at 11:35 PM Report Share Posted March 4, 2021 at 11:35 PM I’ll have said this on here previously, but for those of us from languages which don’t use diacritics, diacritics are very easy to ignore or forget. I can see the sense of encoding tones as spelling. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tomsima Posted March 5, 2021 at 12:51 AM Author Report Share Posted March 5, 2021 at 12:51 AM I am one of those that comes from a languages without diacritics, and I find it a lot less likely to confuse, say, guo gwo guoo and guoh - they seem to get processed by my brain as separate words, where guō guó guǒ guò seem to all get categorised as 'types of guo' before I actively work on remembering the differences. Definitely personal preference though, I would be cautious advocating for a system that uses 'l' to represent 儿化音 or transcriptions like 'farng' for a character like 房 ' or 'shinq' for 姓, etc. I'm spending this year working on shorthand, and the way GR writes tones as letters means I can adapt the system to use an English shorthand system to note-take in Chinese, and thats been the real attraction for me. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest realmayo Posted March 5, 2021 at 10:34 AM Report Share Posted March 5, 2021 at 10:34 AM Interesting - although I've always loved the idea of GR, if it came to shorthand I'd have assumed that a diacritic for tones would be quicker. But I've only ever dabbled in a spot of teeline, where you've got scope to take liberties with exact spelling if you choose. Quite intrigued actually, presumably you'd run characters together? Wouldn't you be tempted to introduce new shortcuts for, I don't know, dipthongs? Supposedly zhuyin was based on shorthand.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bobby Dazzler Posted March 9, 2021 at 07:33 AM Report Share Posted March 9, 2021 at 07:33 AM Pleco is very helpful app! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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