General Diacritic Screen

Link to Unicode Converter

Detailed Notes

This screen can be used to provide the diacritical marks conventional over some letters in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Esperanto, replacing Chinese tone numbers or Esperanto x-format letters. In the case of Mandarin and Esperanto, it also provides "ampersand" values for use in non-UTF-8-encoded web pages. (I ran out of steam on the Cantonese. So use UTF-8 already!)

The page is net-independent. Feel free to save a copy to your computer for off-line use.

Cantonese (Yale Spellings)

• The H used to show low tones (阳) (4-6) will be added and should not be part of the input. (E.g., input feng4, not fehng4.)
• First tone (阴平声) in syllables that do not end in a stop (p, t, k) is confusingly marked High-Falling (HF pà) in some sources and High Level (HL pā) in others. In general, the HF variant reflects speech in Guangzhou and the HL variant reflects speech in Hong Kong. This page offers a choice between HF (pà) and HL (pā). Although the pronunciation varies, the phonemic tone category is identical.
• A few sources appear to differentiate two contrasting first tones in some dialects and use both marks. To force a HL tone mark on a non-rùshēng syllable when otherwise using HF, use the code 0. (E.g., la0 always becomes lā.)
• Regardless of the selection of HL or HF, the first (or 7th) tone in a syllable ending in a stop (p, t, k) — yīnrùshēng 阴入声— is here always marked as HL (pāt).
• Most sources now number rùshēng tones as 1, 3, and 6. The older codes 7, 8, and 9 may be used, but will be construed as equivalent to 1, 3, and 6 (pāt pat paht).
• Do not use this page for Cantonese texts containing numbers other than tone marks. In Cantonese text, numbers, regardless of location may be modified.
• Standard computer type fonts do not gracefully handle the syllables m and ng in all tones. The present workarounds are, for the time being, about as good as it gets.

For Mandarin (Pinyin Spellings)

• Prepare the romanized Mandarin text with a number at the end of each syllable that should have a tone mark. Use the letter v the represent the letter ü. It makes no difference whether there are spaces between syllables, so normal rules of word-division can be followed.

For Esperanto

• Prepare the Esperanto text in X format (cx, sx, ux, etc.).
• If the x should be retained rather than functioning as a circumflex indicator, place an exclamation point after it (La Chau!x de Fonds), which will be automatically deleted after other changes have been made.