Pinyin sections¶

Pinyin sections in groff files are enclosed by two .pinyin requests with different arguments. The starting request is

.pinyin start

.pinyin begin

.pinyin stop

.pinyin end

Syllables¶

In Pinyin, each syllable is represented by one to six letters drawn from the fifty-two upper- and lowercase letters of the Unicode basic Latin 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 basic Latin 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 tone mark table is omitted from this rendering of the man page because the selected output device “html” lacks the character repertoire to display it. Try another output device.]

The neutral tone number can be omitted from a word-final syllable, but not otherwise.