Row 1: Characters + Bopomofo* (Ruby text).
Row 2: GR Tonal Spelling* (Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Bopomofo’s romanized companion; ), with Hanyu Pinyin** below.
Row 3: English uses Latin (PETR “rock” + OLEUM “oil”) or Greek (CHAOS → GAS), roots that clearly indicate what’s what. Bote: OLine and OLeum are variants of the same root = “oil”
*Both systems were promulgated by the ROC government (1918, 1928) and still used in Taiwan.
**Pinyin (1958) used GR 國語羅馬字 (1928) as an unacknowledged blueprint (unsurprising: many of the same scholars worked on both). The base forms of GR and Pinyin are 95% the same, but GR uses tone letters (hollow portions are visual mnemonics for pitch movements), whereas Pinyin mark tones with tiny diacritics, hard to type and easily omitted or overlooked.