On Fri, 16 Feb 2001, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> 2) Which Chinese dialect to adopt for transliterating.
Mandarin would be the most likely.
> Notice the particularities of Bopomofo spelling:
>
> - the sound (spelled "ong" in pinyin) is spelled "u-eng";
> - there is no "y" in "yi";
> - there is no sign to indicate the 1st tone.
[snip]
> Also notice that you may have a few typographical problems in producing the
> picture:
>
> a) In most fonts, the glyph for vowel i is a horizontal line. This is only
> valid for vertical texts: in horizontal writing it should be vertical.
> (Suggestion: you may substitute it with an uppercase I from a sans-serif
> font).
Yes, you are right about this. I don't know why TUS3.0 p. 278 says "The
character U+3127 BOPOMOFO LETTER I is usually written as a vertical
stroke when Bopomofo text is set vertically.", which is *wrong*.
> b) The glyph for the "combining breve" (3rd tone) is normally designed to
> fit on western lowercase vowels. (Suggestion: if you use a bigger size for
> the combining marks, you might get a correct result).
I've made two .gif files demonstrating Bopomofo typography:
http://deall.ohio-state.edu/grads/chan.200/misc/biaozhunwanguoma.gif
http://deall.ohio-state.edu/grads/chan.200/misc/tongyima.gif
Both depict left-to-right Han character text, and each character is
annotated on its right side with top-to-bottom Bopomofo text.
(Alternatively, I could have created versions where the Han character text
runs top-to-bottom, and each character is annotated on its right side with
top-to-bottom Bopomofo text, but I didn't.)
Note the place of the tone diacritics, which is "stacked" even more to the
right than the Bopomofo consonants and vowels.
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:21:18 EDT
