GROperator — Gwoyeu Romatzyh¶

cjklib.reading.operator.GROperator is a mature implementation of the Chinese Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanisation (國語羅馬字, often abbreviated GR). Gwoyeu Romatzyh is different from most other romanisation methods as that it encodes Chinese tones using alphabetic characters instead of diacritics or digits.

Features:

support of abbreviated forms (zh, j, g, sherm, ...),
conversion of abbreviated forms to full forms,
placement of apostrophes before 0-initial syllables,
support for different apostrophe characters,
support for r-coloured syllables (Erlhuah),
syllable repetition markers (x, v, vx) and
guessing of input form (reading dialect).

Specifics¶

Tones¶

Tones are transcribed rigorously as syllables in the neutral tone additionally carry the original (etymological) tone information. Y.R. Chao also annotates the optional neutral tone (e.g. buh jy˳daw) which can be pronounced with either the neutral tone or the etymological one. Compared to other reading operators for Mandarin, special care has to be taken to cope with these special requirements.

R-colouring¶

Gwoyeu Romatzyh renders rhotacised syllables (Erlhuah, er-ization) by trying to give the actual pronunciation. As the effect of r-colouring loses the information of the underlying etymological syllable conversion between the r-coloured form back to the underlying form can not be done in an unambiguous way. As furthermore finals i, iu, in, iun contrast in the first and the second tone but not in the third and the forth tone conversion between different tones (including the base form) cannot be made in a general manner: 小鸡儿 sheau-jiel is different to 小街儿 sheau-jie’l but 几儿 jieel (from jǐ) equals 姐儿 jieel (from jiě), see Chao.

Thus this ReadingOperator lacks the general handling of syllable renderings and many methods narrow the range of syllables allowed. While original forms can carry any tone (even though Mandarin doesn’t make use of some combinations), r-coloured forms for Erlhuah will currently be limited to those given in the source by Y.R. Chao. Those not mentioned there will raise an UnsupportedError.

Abbreviations¶

Yuen Ren Chao includes several abbreviated forms in his books (references see below). For example 個/个 which would be fully transcribed as .geh or ˳geh is abbreviated as g. These forms can be accessed by getAbbreviatedForms() and getAbbreviatedFormData(), and their usage can be contolled by option 'abbreviations'. Use the GRDialectConverter to convert these abbreviations into their full forms:

>>> from cjklib.reading import ReadingFactory
>>> f = ReadingFactory()
>>> f.convert('Hairtz', 'GR', 'GR', breakUpAbbreviated='on')
u'Hair.tzy'

Repetition markers¶

Special abbreviated forms are given in form of repetition markers. These take the form x and v or a combination vx for repetition of the last syllable/the second last syllable or both, e.g. shie.x for shie.shie, deengiv for deengideeng and duey .le vx for duey .le duey .le. Both forms can be preceded by a neutral tone mark, e.g. .x or ˳v.

Sources¶

Yuen Ren Chao: A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968, ISBN 0-520-00219-9.
Yuen Ren Chao: Mandarin Primer: an intensive course in spoken Chinese. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1948.