GRPinyinConverter — Gwoyeu Romatzyh to Pinyin

Specifics

Features:

• configurable mapping of options neutral tone when converting from GR,
• conversion of abbreviated forms of GR.

Upper- or lowercase will be transfered between syllables, no special formatting according to anyhow defined standards will be guaranteed. Upper-/lowercase will be identified according to three classes: either the whole syllable is uppercase, only the initial letter is uppercase (titlecase) or otherwise the whole syllable is assumed being lowercase. For entities of single latin characters uppercase has precedence over titlecase, e.g. I will convert to YI from Gwoyeu Romatzyh to Pinyin, not to Yi.

Limitations

Conversion cannot in general be done in a one-to-one manner. Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR) gives the etymological tone for a syllable in neutral tone while Pinyin doesn’t. Thus converting neutral tone syllables from Pinyin to GR will fail as the etymological tone is unknown to the operator.

While tones in GR carry more information, r-coloured syllables (Erlhuah) are rendered the way they are pronounced thus loosing information about the underlying syllable. Converting those forms to Pinyin is not always possible as for example jieel will raise an L{AmbiguousConversionError} as it stems from jǐ, jiě and jǐn. Having the original string in Chinese characters might help to disambiguate.

Neutral tone

As described above, converting the neutral tone from Pinyin to GR fails. Converting to Pinyin will lose knowledge about the etymological tone, and in the case of optional neutral tones it has to be decided whether the neutral tone version or the etymological tone is chosen, as Pinyin can only display one. This can be controlled using option 'grOptionalNeutralToneMapping'.

Class