On Mon, 5 Jan 2004 17:37:30 -0800 (PST), Kenneth Whistler wrote:I received the following reply from a Zhuang researcher, which agrees with what Andrew has written:
Perhaps someone on the list who knows more about the actual history of orthographic reform in the Zhuang Autonomous Region of Guangxi could chime in with more details.
Well, I'm not really that knowledgeable about Zhuang, but but my father-in-law is a native Zhuang speaker, and I've visited "Zhuangland" many times, so I have absorbed some knowledge on the subject by osmosis.
The original Zhuang alphabet devised in 1955 and officially promulgated in 1957 used an unwieldy mixture of Latin and Cyrillic letters together with the special tone letters encoded at U+01A7/01A8 [tone 2], U+01BC/01BD [tone 5] and U+0184/0185 [tone 6]. However, in 1982 the Zhuang alphabet was amended to use basic Latin letters only, so that the old tone letters are now written as "z", "j", "x", "q" and "h" :
...
The officially approved Zhuang orthography is, in fact, a strictly Latin one. When I type it, I use a QWERTY keyboard and whatever English font I happen to want to use. Yes, there was sort of a Cyrllic/Latin hybrid orthography developed during the early 50s by some Russian linguists and approved by the government, but it was revised to the Latin-based orthography some years later. I assume the date given in the message below (1986) it correct, but I can't confirm that out of my own personal knowledge. I can tell you that no Cyrllic characters are in use today, except that I think some paper money printed in China still has some of the older orthography on it.
In the messages below, there is a bit of confusion about the tone spelling system. It works like this:
For syllables that do not end in a stop:
Tone 1, no tone letter Tone 2, 'z' Tone 3, 'j' Tone 4, 'x' Tone 5, 'q' Tone 6, 'h'
For syllables that are "checked" (i.e., end in a stop), the system works like this:
Tone 7, either 'p,' 't,' or 'k,' depending on the point of articulation.
Tone 8, either 'b,' 'd' or 'g,' depending on the point of articulation.
Note that these three stops all sound the same, the spelling difference indicates difference in syllable tone, not in the nature of the stop itself.
There are two other orthographies in use in Zhuang. Most important, there is an ancient Zhuang square-character script that has never been standardized. If it ever is, maybe we can get a unicode font for it. Until then, I wouldn't worry about it much. Second, sometimes, very informally, people will use Chinese characters to write Zhuang. This happens rarely.
On this last paragraph, I note that this ancient Zhuang script has not even been roadmapped. From a brief Internet search, I found that it consists of about 10,000 characters. Or is it roadmapped under another name? Or is it unified with CJK - despite the researcher clearly distinguishing it from Chinese characters?
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
