I think when talking about languages we should keep things simple and use simple language which we can all understand. Now, if I wanted to write 'hao bu hao(?') on this site it's probably not necessary for me to include the tonal indicators, because we all know what that means. But other meanings in pinyin and we have problems because as you know the same words can have many different meanings. There would only be one way around it and that's to include the tone number. Unless of course I wanted to write- rising tone/falling tone, etceteras. No, short of using Chinese characters(hardly appropriate for oral English FT forum,) there simply is no other way but to include representative numbers; unless I have the software to include the tonal indicators. And before I get called an illiterate, it wasn't me who had recourse to using 'hao bu hao' originally because I didn't know any characters. I know what's coming ha ha ha!