gwoyeu romatzyh as a pleco option?

[Tomsima]

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?

[mikelove]

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.

[Tomsima]

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?

[mikelove]

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.

[anonymoose]

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?

[roddy]

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. 

[Tomsima]

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.

[realmayo]

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....

 

 

[Bobby Dazzler]

Pleco is very helpful app!