The Musical Phonetics of Taiwanese
by Tainan Lee
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About the Book
Taiwanese has eight tones, and words change tone as they are spoken. Until now, the tones are indicated diacritically, which is clumsy for lack of eight live diacritics. The “Roman” spelling is archaic, such as using “phai” for the sound of “pie” and up to three letters for one consonant. The all-important vowel ə is degraded to an umlaut of o. Thereby, Taiwanese becomes hard to learn. Fortunately, the secrets are out! Taiwanese needs only 24 phonetic letters, one letter per sound. There are three level tones, like singing in do re mi. Each has a “stopped-sound” version, like the staccato in music. A rising, and a descending tone complete the eight. No waving tones! Better, each tone changes by a simple “circular rotation” to its neighboring tone. Built on the basic human sounds of do, re, mi, Taiwanese is musical and universally learnable. Whereas no language is “easy”, and written Taiwanese needs improvement, the new Lee phonetic system aims to facilitate the teaching and self-learning of the beautiful spoken Taiwanese.
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