tonal spelling

tonal spelling is an alternative form of Chinese romanization, which uses spelling to indicate tone rather than diacritics like pinyin. the most well-known version is probably gwoyeu romatzyh. as you can see already, tonal spelling tends to be rather ugly, but it does have the advantage that alternate spellings are easier to notice and remember than tiny diacritics.

I've created a version of tonal spelling for my own study that uses pinyin spelling with upper and lowercase letters to represent the tones:

zhang1 zhang2 zhang3 zhang4 zhang5
ZHANG  zhANG  zhang  ZHang  'zhang

I actually got the idea from memes 😂 where a jumble of uppercase and lowercase letters are used to represent the tone of someone's voice going up and down in a sarcastic way. anyway, I tend to prefer using this form of romanization because it's easier to type than pinyin. so if you see it used around this site, that's why.

details

notice that the spelling reflects how Chinese syllables are divided into initial, medial, and final sounds. this means that ch/sh/zh at the beginning of a word will either be both uppercase or both lowercase.

for syllables that consist of a single sound (vowels), the vowel can be doubled when necessary to show the tone, e.g. A aA a Aa 'a

since the apostrophe is being used for the neutral tone, this means that a hyphen is needed where an apostrophe would normally be used in pinyin to separate ambiguous syllables.

since uppercase letters can't be used to signify proper names, it can also be good to use an underline or some other means to do that.

finally, since this spelling requires being able to distinguish between upper and lowercase characters, it works best with monospace, serif, or small caps fonts rather than sans serif. in handwriting, just remember to write uppercase Is with serifs.

see also

resources

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