GPINYIN

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: 7 March 2023
Index Return to Main Contents
 

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.

ToneDescriptionDiacriticExample InputExample Output

firstflata-ma1m04
secondrising´ma2m01
thirdfalling-risingahma3m0C
fourthfalling`ma4m00
fifthneutral(none)ma0ma
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

This document was created by man2html, using the manual pages.
Time: 22:22:34 GMT, March 28, 2024