Pinyin Sections¶

Pinyin sections in groff files are enclosed by two .pinyin requests with different arguments. The starting request is

.pinyin start

.pinyin begin

.pinyin stop

.pinyin end

Syllables¶

The spoken Chinese language is based on about 411 syllables; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_table.

In Pinyin, each syllable consists of one to six letters from the Latin alphabet; these letters comprise the fifty-two upper- and lowercase letters from the ASCII character set, plus the letter “U” with dieresis (umlaut) in both cases—in other words, the members of the set “[a–zA–ZüÜ]”.

In groff input, all ASCII letters are written as themselves. The “u with dieresis” can be written as “\[:u]” in lowercase or “\[:U]” in uppercase. Within .pinyin sections, gpinyin supports the form “ue” for lowercase and the forms “Ue” and “UE” for uppercase.

Tones¶

Each syllable has exactly one of five tones. The fifth tone is not explicitly written at all, but each of the first through fourth tones is indicated with a diacritic above a specific vowel within the syllable.

In a gpinyin source file, these tones are written by adding a numeral in the range 0 to 5 after the syllable. The tone numbers 1 to 4 are transformed into accents above vowels in the output. The tone numbers 0 and 5 are synonymous.

The following table summarizes the tones. Some output devices will not be able to render every output example.

The neutral tone number can be omitted from a word-final syllable, but not otherwise.