GPINYIN
Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 21 March 2020
Index
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NAME
gpinyin - use Hanyu Pinyin Chinese in roff
SYNOPSIS
[input-file
...]
-h
--help
-v
--version
DESCRIPTION
gpinyin
is a preprocessor for
groff(1)
that facilitates use of the Hanyu Pinyin
groff(7)
files.
Pinyin is a method for writing the Chinese language with the Latin
alphabet.
The Chinese language consists of more than four hundred syllables,
each with one of five different tones.
In Pinyin,
a syllable is written in the Latin alphabet and a numeric tone indicator
can be appended to each syllable.
Each
input-file
is a file name or the hyphen-minus character "-" to indicate
that standard input should be read.
As usual,
the argument "--" can be used in order to force interpretation
of all remaining arguments as file names,
even if an
input-file
argument begins with the hyphen-minus character.
Pinyin Sections
Pinyin sections in
groff
files are enclosed by two
.pinyin
requests with different arguments.
The starting request is
-
.pinyin start
or
-
.pinyin begin
and the ending request is
-
.pinyin stop
or
-
.pinyin end
.
Syllables
The spoken Chinese language is based on about 411
syllables;
see
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.
| Tone | Description | Diacritic | Example Input | Example Output
|
|
| first | flat | a- | ma1 | m04
|
| second | rising | ´ | ma2 | m01
|
| third | falling-rising | ah | ma3 | m0C
|
| fourth | falling | ` | ma4 | m00
|
| fifth | neutral | (none) | ma0 | ma
|
| ma5 |
The neutral tone number can be omitted from a word-final syllable,
but not otherwise.
OPTIONS
- -h
-
--help
Print usage information and exit.
- -v
-
--version
Print version information and exit.
AUTHORS
gpinyin
was written by
Bernd Warken
SEE ALSO
Useful documents on the World Wide Web related to Pinyin include
-
"Pinyin" (Wikipedia)
"Pinyin table" (Wikipedia)
Pinyin to Unicode
On-line Chinese Tools
Pinyin.info: a guide to the writing of Mandarin Chinese in romanization
"Where do the tone marks go?" (Pinyin.info)
pinyin.txt from the CJK macro package for
and
pinyin.sty from the CJK macro package for
groff(1),
grog(1),
and
groffer(1)
explain how to view
roff
documents.
groff(7)
and
groff_char(7)
are comprehensive references covering the language elements of GNU
roff
and the available glyph repertoire,
respectively.
Index
- NAME
-
- SYNOPSIS
-
- DESCRIPTION
-
- Pinyin Sections
-
- Syllables
-
- Tones
-
- OPTIONS
-
- AUTHORS
-
- SEE ALSO
-
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Time: 08:55:09 GMT, December 16, 2021