Dear lazyweb,

I am looking for examples of bad Pinyin where invalid diacritics are being used.

I have two already for the third tone, but I am curious if other tones also see similar errors.

1. Xiàndài Hànyû Dàcídiân (Circumflex)
2. Wŏ huì shuō yìdiănr (Breve)

Pinyin doesn't always specify finals in a straightforward way. For example it is difficult to see that wei and dui have the same final -uei, the former substituting u for semi-vowel w, the latter omitting the e. In Views on initials and finals of Mandarin in Pinyin I've tried to show those peculiarities by grouping forms under their actual final, not just their spelling. What I didn't do was merging columns -o (bo, po, mo, fo) and -uo (duo, tuo, ...).

Pinyin or fully Hanyu Pinyin is the standard Romanisation for Mandarin. It is widely used and only in few cases older Romanisations like Wade-Giles or Bopomofo prevail. So as Pinyin is ubiquitous you think you've seen it all? Do you know characters ê, ẑ, ĉ, ŝ and ŋ?

Standard Mandarin (Putonghua) is spoken by many people and in fact is the language with the most native speakers. There are then many people who acquire it as a second language increasing the number of speakers further. In a lot of places people will furthermore speak a local variant of Mandarin (e.g. in Sichuan).

I want to add something to what I said in Mandarin phonology with IPA: