I'm learning Chinese and I'm wondering if there is a way to input pinyin easily.
"pinyin" is a word with tone, like "qǐngwèn".
Is there a emacs minor mode for pinyin?
If there is not yet I'll try to write it. But I have only very little knowledge about emacs lisp.
I want to have pinyin input mode itself that can input tone marks easily. I don't need Chinese IME.
Emacs has four pinyin input variants, the names start with chinese-py. You can set the input method with C-x enter \ or M-x set-input-method, and get a description with M-x describe-input-method.
I haven't used any of them, and haven't read all the descriptions, so I don't know the exact difference between the variants.
Edit
If you just want to input the diacritical marks above the vowels that are used in pinyin to indicate the tone, you can also use an input method. You type two letters for the vowel+mark you want. For example, the method latin-2-prefix has
'a -> á `a -> à ~a -> ă
More details with list-input-methods and the descriptions, as explained above.
However, as far as I know, there's no pre-defined input method that includes the macron ā, but you can define your own method, as explained in this stackexchange question.
chinese-py is a Chinese IME using pinyin. I want to input a pinyin itself with tone marks. So these are different.
chinese-sisheng input method allows writing tonal marks to produce good-looking pinyin like below:
ni3 -> nǐ
hao3 -> hǎo
nv3 -> nǚ
https://github.com/tumashu/pyim pyim is the best IME for now.
It's written in Lisp only. So you don't need any extra tools.
fcitxin tty. If you are referring to inputting those accented characters, there may be some general methods (well, but not so straightforward as inputingqing3wen4and get the thing you want I guess). P.S. I wanted to say US-intl, but it doesn't support all four tone markers… P.P.S. Emacs has a pinyin IM in its 25 Chinese IMs, if you are referring to something that gives you the corresponding 汉字 from pinyin.