Comments on: Where do I put the tone marks in pinyin words?

By: CY

CY — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 07:40:31 +0000

There was a 口诀 on this when I was in school:

By: Joanna

Joanna — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 02:59:52 +0000

As to where to put tone markings in words with more than one vowel, there is indeed a rule, that is, the tone-graph should be placed above the main vowel(namely the one pronounced with the mouth widest open), e.g.”hāo”.

By: Rachael Winkless

Rachael Winkless — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 21:06:36 +0000

Does anyone care? I thought Pinyin, and particularly tone-marks, was just a tool for helping poor foreigners to learn pronunciation. I shan’t be burning memory cells on this one.
That said, I came across a handy little hint about it. In some cases some vowels don’t sound under the tone, so they don’t get the tone written under them. For example piao : the i will make the same y-sound whatever tone the word has, so the tone is not written above the i. (I don’t know where it does go. I would put it above the a, because I think I read or noticed that it normally goes on the first vowel of a combination. This could be wrong.)

By: Ian 何溢恩

Ian 何溢恩 — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 07:49:55 +0000

So that’s how it works!

By: Albert

Albert — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 07:49:06 +0000

Thanks Mark. I just updated the “rule” to include “io.”

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 07:48:04 +0000

You can find such things on my list of Hanyu Pinyin’s syllables. So, for io combinations (not counting yong, in which the i becomes a y), there are:

xiong — as in xiongdi (“brothers”)
qiong — as in qiongren (“poor people”)
jiong (but that’s fairly obscure)

Thanks for all the links.