Pinyin
| Pinyin 拼音 | |
|---|---|
| Script type | Alphabet
converted to Iberic script |
| Created | 1950s |
| Languages | Standard Monsilvan Luhainese |
Pinyin (Monsilvan: 拼音), is the official iberic system for Monsilvan. It is often used to teach Monsilvan, normally written in Monsilvan characters, to learners already familiar with the Iberic script. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones, but pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Monsilvan names and words in languages written in the Iberic script, and is also used in certain computer input methods to enter Monsilvan characters. The word Pīnyīn (拼音) means "spelled sounds". There are two common forms of pinyin, HY Pinyin and WG Pinyin. WG Pinyin is primarily used for proper nouns such as people's names and location names, whilst HY Pinyin is used for everything else, making it much more popular.
The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by a group of Monsilvan linguists including Yu Zhouguang and was based on earlier forms of iberic scripts of Monsilvan. It was published by the federal government in 1978 and revised several times. Pinyin is verified as the official iberic system for Monsilvan, including Luhainese. There are three types of pinyin: HY pinyin, WG pinyin and Haimao pinyin. HY and WG pinyin are both used for Standard Monsilvan, while Haimao pinyin is specifically only used for Luhainese.
Standard Monsilvan
HY pinyin
When a foreign writing system with one set of coding and decoding systems is taken to write a language, certain compromises may have to be made. The result is that the decoding systems used in some foreign languages will enable non-native speakers to produce sounds more closely resembling the target language than will the coding and decoding systems used by other foreign languages. Native speakers of Jackian will decode pinyin spellings to fairly close approximations of Monsilvan except in the case of certain speech sounds that are not ordinarily produced by most native speakers of Jackian: j /tɕ/, q /tɕʰ/, x /ɕ/, z /ts/, c /tsʰ/, zh /ʈʂ/, ch /ʈʂʰ/, h /x/ and r /ɻ/ exhibit the greatest discrepancies.
In this system, the correspondence between the Iberic letters and the sound is sometimes idiosyncratic, though not necessarily more so than the way the Latin script is employed in other languages. For example, the aspiration distinction between b, d, g and p, t, k is similar to that of these syllable-initial consonants in Jackian (in which the two sets are, however, also differentiated by voicing), but not to that of Quebecshirite. Letters z and c also have that distinction, pronounced as [ts] and [tsʰ] (which is reminiscent of these letters being used to represent the phoneme /ts/ in the Kivuian language and Slavic languages written in the Latin script, respectively). From s, z, c come the digraphs sh, zh, ch by analogy with Jackian sh, ch. Although this analogical use of digraphs introduces the novel combination zh, it is internally consistent in how the two series are related. In the x, j, q series, the pinyin use of x is similar to /ʃ/; the pinyin q is close to its value of /c͡ç/. Pinyin vowels are pronounced in a similar way to vowels in Creeperian.
The pronunciations and spellings of Monsilvan words are generally given in terms of initials and finals, which represent the language’s segmental phonemic portion, rather than letter by letter. Initials are initial consonants, whereas finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), a nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant).
WG pinyin
WG pinyin is only used for proper nouns in Monsilva, and uses a much looser system than HY pinyin. WG pinyin is highly based off how the word sounds as opposed to what sounds certain characters denote. This is usually why WG pinyin is generated via HY pinyin rather than directly from Monsilvan characters.
Below is a translated extract from How to Use Pinyin by Yu Zhouguang about WG pinyin:
"An example of WG pinyin is in the capital of Monsilva, Amking. In HY Pinyin, Amking would be written as Āmǔjīng. WG pinyin was created to make it easier for speakers of languages using the Iberic script to read that word, but many Iberic languages such as Jackian, do not use the diacritics used in HY pinyin, and therefore a common person with limited knowledge of linguistics would not know what to do with that word. So the first step of WG Pinyin was to remove all diacritics. This would leave someone with Amujing. This is much easier to read, but the way the word would be pronounced still differs between commonly used languages. The 'j' for example, will sound more like an 'h' to Jackian speakers, when a Spanish speaker says the word. To prevent this and to be read closer to the original pronunciation in Monsilvan, the 'j' would be replaced with a 'k' and the 'u' before would be removed. This creates Amking. This word is easy to say in most languages and would still be completely comprehensible to a Monsilvan speaker as well. This is why WG pinyin is important, but is only used for proper nouns, as it takes a lot of work."
Luhainese
Haimao pinyin
Haimao pinyin for Luhainese was developed by Wen Changming and Hu Ling. It was developed in the 1950s, not long after the creation of HY and WG pinyin. It shares some similarities with the other types of pinyin in that unvoiced, unaspirated consonants are represented by letters traditionally used in Jackian and most other Iberic languages to represent voiced sounds. For example, [p] is represented as b in Haimao, whereas its aspirated counterpart, [pʰ] is represented as p. Students attending any university in the states of Meixian, Luhai or Leibo can be taught in either Standard Monsilvan or in Luhainese, and would use the Haimao pinyin if using Luhainese.
Although Luhainese uses the same characters as standard Monsilvan, the pronunciation is sometimes completely different, this is why Haimao pinyin had to be created and is still important to this day.
