Introduction to Tangent Constructed Chinese
The Tangent Constructed Chinese/Tangent’s Constructed Chinese is meant to be a better representative of Chinese than Mandarin or Cantonese, and to harmonize with Sino-Xenic pronunciations. It’s meant to be a modern variety of Chinese that resembles Middle Chinese.
The first form of the TCC resembled a modern variety of Chinese without voiced initials and the “back a to o” shift. However of the few people that are interested, they preferred something that more resembled Middle Chinese, and thus revisions have been made to make it more resemble MC.
Grammar is also a part of TCC but it’s a side dish. It mostly sticks with Cantonese grammar and choice of words that are common with Classical Chinese, like 食 instead of 吃.
I started to have this idea for TCC when I was learning about ancient Chinese culture at school, and was trying to tell my Western friends about them. I needed a sort of Romanization, for say, concepts like 氣 and 念.
Looking at online sources, they mostly only list the Mandarin readings, and sometimes also the Cantonese readings, although the Jyutping Romanization has been modified to Yale because of opposition (most likely). But the point is, I needed a Romanization for representing these Chinese concepts, but why not use Mandarin or Cantonese, the two Chinese languages I speak?
There are several reasons. I watched a video that was part of a Japanese-teaching series. In one of the videos, the Japanese teacher said that the Japanese kanji have a “Chinese reading”, which is meant to imitate the Chinese pronunciation. And he started with 一, which is pronounced ichi in modern Japanese “Chinese reading”. He comments, however, that it “does not actually sound like Chinese because in Chinese it is pronounced i (English approximation: ‘ee’)”.
Another thing is, I just do not feel comfortable when I tell my friends that say, 念 is pronounced nian in “Chinese”. Because Chinese is a collection of languages (even though people would say that those languages are actually dialects because of political reasons), and the character, as far as I’m concerned, is pronounced with an –m ending in a majority of Chinese languages. So it seems like I’m claiming the character is pronounced “nian” when like 90% of “Chinese” isn’t pronounced this way. In TCC, the character is written as “niem~” in my Romanization.
So I think Mandarin and Cantonese are both not very good representations of “Chinese” when I need to refer to a concept/name/etc. Mandarin lacks one of the prominent “four tones” of Chinese: the checked tone. And Cantonese, the only other Chinese I can say I know well enough, lacks medials, which are also a prominent feature of Chinese that is found in many Chinese languages.
This TCC is designed to be used when I need to refer to Chinese things that aren’t things like placenames to Western people, for games and stories that require a Chinese pronunciation of things, etc.
The current version of Tangent Constructed Chinese has the following initials, and their Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese correspondences are given in fig 1. Letters in red are specifically limited to yang (陽) tones, and letters in blue correspond to the retroflex stops of Middle Chinese. There are exceptions, but these are what they generally correspond to.
The main vowels, medials and diphthongs are given below. A syllable can consist of:
(initial)+(medial)+(vowel)+(ending consonant)
All of the parts are optional, but must have at least the vowel or the ending consonant component. A diphthong cannot precede an ending consonant, but it may be considered a vowel+ending C sequence.
[Note: as revisions are made the following is subject to change without edits so you may want to read the blog instead of just this post for updates]
The main vowels are as follows: a e i (o) u â ê
The vowels are pronounced as their Spanish counterparts but “e” is a lax /ɛ/ while “o” is a tense /o/.
A-circumflex stands for back /ɑ/ while e-circumflex stands for a schwa, transcribed as /ə/.
The diphthongs are as follows:
ai eu êi iu âi âu ou. The order is from CTCC, æ+i, æ+u, ɛ+i>ei, etc.
Note that ou actually stands for /əu/ instead of /ou/
Three medials may be added in front of the vowels or diphthongs:
y-/-i-, w, yw-/-iu-
At the beginning of a character with no initial, the medials would be written as y, w and yw. If they are preceded by an initial though, they are written as the vowel forms. If the medials are the full vowels of the character, the consonant is added in front, e.g. <yit> instead of <it>, in the current version.
“Yu” is, however, its own final and is not written as “iu” anywhere in the current revision. It is contrasted with “(y)iu”. “Yu” can be pronounced /ju/. Non-schwa vowels are modally long, and may be short when followed by an ending consonant.
It is my intention to reflect Sino pronunciations in orthography, so you don’t need to learn how special combinations of letters represent a different sound or how <o> would correspond to a non-/o/ or /ɔ/ vowel in order to see the resemblance between the TCC and the Sino pronunciations.
It was also my intention to use a 6-vowel system with the standard a e i o u ə. So I intentionally did not use more than that. “O” is mostly an “A” in Sino pronunciations and thus <o> isn’t often seen in TCC, appearing mostly only before velars.
Final consonants are mostly the same as Cantonese finals. “/” indicates a rising tone and “~” indicates a departing tone.
Vowel correspondences:
(See figure 2)
A-circumflex itself corresponds to Cantonese and Mandarin -o, which becomes –uo after non-labial consonants and –e after velars (including ng, which is lost) in Mandarin.
In Mandarin, a-circumflex that is in compounds (ai, an, ang, ao) become /a/, but in Cantonese they are shifted uniformly to -o
High vowels in Cantonese open to diphthongs in certain environments, compare TCC –i with Cantonese -ei
“-ien” is a TCC final that corresponds to Cantonese –in, Mandarin –ian and Japanese –en.
Note that Mandarin medials do not correspond fully to TCC medials. Compare:
剛 疆 and 江
Man: gang, jiang, jiang
Canto: gong, goeng, gong
TCC: kâng, kiâng, kâng
Also note that in Mandarin, “i”s are lost after retroflex C, “w”s are lost after labials, etc. E.g. 少 shieu~ > Mandarin shao\ and Cantonese siu3.
TCC -ie- can be -i- in the literary pronunciation of Cantonese but -e- in the colloquial pronunciation, e.g. 掉 dieu~ and 靑 tsieng:
Cantonese lit: diu6, ching1; colloquial: deu6, cheng1
Correction of above figure: TCC gn corresponds to Japanese n, sh>s, while zh>s/z.
Below: TCC (now iu) corresponds to u or yu in Mandarin.
