Revamp Mandarin diphthongs (onset glides should be part of the onset)

Dannyu_NDos · 2023 年 9 月 22 日午前 4:30

The current Mandarin phonemes have a vast amount of diphthongs and triphthongs, and I think this is a bad choice, for the following reasons:

They aren’t consistent with Bopomofo, which separates the onset glide from the vowel. For example, ia isn’t assigned a separate Bopomofo letter, but is rather expressed as two letters, “ㄧㄚ”.
Theoretically, fricatives and approximants would suffer from the lack of distinction by palatalization [ʲ] or labialization [ʷ]. For example, [ɕ] and [ɕʷ] sound different, and thus should be assigned different SynthV phonemes.
And perhaps most importantly, this scheme of phonemes hinders the ability to synthesize languages that are not officially supported. When I synthesize Korean with SynthV, though many Korean phonemes are covered by Mandarin phonemes, it’s quite annoying to insert a separate semivowel phoneme between the onset and the vowel and adjust its length.

So here’s my suggestion. Turn the current scheme of Mandarin phonemes to legacy, and the new scheme shall be as follows:

Onsets:

Monophthongs:

Phoneme	Examples
`a`	阿 a, 广 an, 卬 ang, 牙 ya, 洋 yang, 咓 wa, 丸 wan, 尢 wang
`@`	厄 e, 恩 en, 鞥 eng, 文 wen, 瓮 weng
`e`	也 ye, 言 yan, 月 yue, 元 yuan
`i`	一 yi, 引 yin, 英 ying
`o`	喔 o, 育 yo, 我 wo
`u`	五 wu, 用 yong
`v`	于 yu, 云 yun

Diphthongs:

Semivowels:

Syllabic consonants:

Phoneme	Examples
`m=`	呣 m
`N=`	嗯 ng

Codas:

Phoneme	Examples
`:n`	广 an
`N`	卬 ang