Campbell Universal Pinyin In Use

I’m going to continue applying this CUP for any other Sinitic languages, including Taiwanese (a dialect of Southern Min) and Cantonese both of which already have various romanization standards in use. The reason for this is so that the reader/user can immediately identify where pronunciations differ from one language to the next.

That way you don’t get what developed in Europe over two thousand years of natural language change: the European use of Roman letters (and Cyrillic for that matter) is quite a hodgepodge of vastly differing spelling vs. pronunciation systems. For example,  ’ch’ is pronounced ’sh’ in French and Portuguese, ‘ch’ in English and Spanish, ‘k’ in Italian and Romanian, like IPA /x/ in German and Polish. To produce an English ‘ch’ in other languages, you’d have to write ‘tsch’ in German, ‘cz’ in Polish, ‘č’ in Czech, ‘cs’ in Hungarian, ‘c’ in Romanian and Italian, and I can’t think of the equivalent in French and Portuguese. Quite a mess–each language has a whole set of new rules of spelling and pronunciation to master–which, by the way, have never posed an obstacle to me, but I can obviously see the drawbacks of it.

The same is true for romanizations of various East Asian languages, however, a single language may have several systems. My introducing a unified pinyin for all the Sinitic languages does no good in eliminating or reducing the number of romanizations, however, I find necessity for it in a sphere where no standards exist and many of the languages still lack any romanization whatsoever (Hui, Gan, Hakka, Northern Min — to name a few).

The great thing about CUP is that it in all its great number of sounds and extensions, you won’t find any letters that can’t be typed on a western European keyboard (I personally use the international Spanish keyboard as much as I can because you can easily add acute, grave, and diaresis/umlaut to any vowel–which is about all I need aside from Portuguese and the eastern European languages.)

This brings me back to Taiwanese. There are a lot of raving fans of the romanization standard you see on Wikipedia (the language is called Ban-lam-gu in the language column), although I doubt that the number of raving fans of a writing system that hardly any native speaker knows, is very much at all. It is however the most commonly used and only makes sense for it to be used also by Wikipedia.

But the pesky letters of Taiwanese. Not only does it require tone markings like circonflex and caron over syllabic consonants ‘m’ and ‘n’, it has an ‘o’+dot that is virtually impossible to type that can also combine with tone markings.

I want to type in this language. But I don’t want to have to use that romanization system, nor any that is virtually impossible to type on a keyboard that doesn’t already come pre-installed in my computer. I also dislike installing specialized software just to type it. I’ve learned that the fewer things installed and loading into my computer, the longer it lasts.

This means that I have to go back through all the old Taiwanese I have entered into my computer and convert it into this new format. This may take some time, but it’ll make a lot more sense in the long run.