Book Description

Discovery of Taiwanese tones and rules of tone changes. Taiwanese phonetics is based on three level tones, Tones 1,2,3. Add the derived tones, namely three cut tones, 1.,2.,3., one down tone, Tone 4 and one up tone, Tone 5, and there are eight tones altogether. The three level tones are musical. The tone changes follow the rules of circular rotation. The tones and tone changes are explainable by rules of music, physics and auditory physiology. This makes Taiwanese tones simple, clear and easy to teach. Taiwanese is likely the most tonal and musical language fo the world. To help teach Taiwanese, and to widen its margin of safety from the status of endangered language, the Author developed a new Taiwanese phonetic alphabet based on popular international phonetic letters. It needs only 24 simple letters, one letter per phoneme, no variants and no umlauts. Together, the tones, the rules of tone changes, and the new Taiwanese phonetic alphabet make a new phonetic system, ??????. The book is intended to become a textbook of Taiwanese phonetics. Chapter by chapter, it teaches Taiwanese sound tone by tone, Taiwanese tone changes rule by rule, and Taiwanese phonetic alphabet letter by letter. The Author then studied comparative phonetics comparing the sounds of Taiwanese, Mandarin Chinese, English and Romanized Taiwanese. With the new Taiwanese phonetic system, the Author further demonstrated its practical applications in Taiwanese words, proverbs, songs and poems. Plenty of appended pictures, tables, theories, songs and poems illustrate Taiwanese literature and cultures. World linguists should find Taiwanese language uniquely tonal and musical. In contrast with all existing methods of teaching, native and international learners of Taiwanese should find Taiwanese pronunciation easy, straight-forward and easy to learn. Viva, Taiwanese!