peenyeen

my impromptu romanisation of mandarin. because the vids of a certain elitponkots inspired me to try make a romanisation of something that doesnt use diacritics and uses a more englishy orthography with weird vowel digraphs and such. "peenyeen" is just my rendition of the name of the usual romanisation "pinyin" in my own romanisation. minus the tones, with tones there would be three e's, peeen yeeen. this is just for fun, and is far from meticulously crafted. i might add to it and change some things around later.

for most of the finals, i found english rhyme sets on wiktionary and went through word lists, seeing what spelling felt good for a specific final. the tones, i figured final h's in words or exclamations in english have kind of a finality to them, where the pitch of the sentence might drop as it ends there, so h became my marker for falling tones, and the dipping tone since it includes a bit of falling or lowering. the high flat tone, apart from high pitch, just sounds like increasing vowel length to me, so i just doubled vowel letters to represent it.

as one can see, i slowly gave up as i went down the table, and switched between different mono and digraphs for what is basically the same vowel qualities. i kind of saw the first set of plain finals and thought i could easily make some easy englishy spellings for these. but then further down the table, chinese phonetics departs far away from what american english could natively achieve. oh well, a kind of fun exercise.