On Mon, 20 Nov 2000, Tom Emerson wrote:
> > Is there any set of characters for writing chinese's Pin Yin with
> > the = differents tone ? I suppose so, I have the Unibook program and
> > I have some difficulties to determine this set of characters.
>
> The tone marks themselves can be found at
> U+02C9 MODIFIER LETTER MACRON (1st tone)
> U+02CA MODIFIER LETTER ACUTE ACCENT (2nd tone)
> U+02C7 MODIFIER LETTER HACEK (3rd tone)
> U+02CB MODIFIER LETTER GRAVE ACCENT (4th tone)
> corresponding to the Big Five codepoints 0xA3BC, 0xA3BD, 0xA3BE, and
> 0xA3BF respectively. Big Five does not contain combined versions of
> the vowels and tone marks.
I believe the four Big5 codepoints A3BC, A3BD, A3BE, and A3BF are actually
intended to be used as tone marks for Zhuyin Fuhao ("Bopomofo"), rather
than Latin-based romanization. A3BC is a blank space in many fonts
intended for use with "Traditional Chinese" (including Microsoft's
MingLiU), which is in line with how Zhuyin Fuhao represents the first
tone (instead of a macron as in Pinyin romanization). In addition, A3BB
is the Zhuyin Fuhao tone mark for the neutral "tone" (instead of a blank
as in Pinyin romanization). Furthermore, those five codepoints also
follow the Zhuyin Fuhao letters beginning at codepoint A370.
Although vanilla Big5 by itself does not contain Latin letters with
diacritics for use in Pinyin romanziation, the HKSCS extension to Big5
("Big5-HKSCS") does contain them (as well as other precomposed full-width
Latin letters that are not already in Big5) at codepoints 8856 to 88A8.
> GB 2312 does not include separate codepoints for the tones themselves
> (or at least not a complete set: it does include U+FF40 FULLWIDTH
> GRAVE ACCENT) though it does contain precomposed versions of the
> vowels (a, e, i, o, u, and ü) with tone marks in row 11, corresponding
> to
[useful list of precomposed combinations in Unicode snipped]
Actually, they exist, although it might not be clear "which grave?", etc,
to use:
A1A5 U+02C9
A840 U+02CA
A1A6 U+02C7
A841 U+02CB
A842 U+02D9
But again, I believe these are intended for use with the Zhuyin Fuhao
letters beginning at codepoint A8C5.
The decompositions for the "Pinyin diacritic-vowel combinations" from
U+01CD to U+01DC (as well as those scattered elsewhere) don't use the
above five "Spacing Modifier Letters", anyway.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
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