Re: USAGE: Chinese Romanization (was: USAGE: Help with Chinese phrase)

On 9 Sep 2004 Ray Brown <ray.brown@FREE...> wrote:

> I really do not think this is getting us anywhere.
  Yes, let's stop it.


> My understanding (which I admit may be faulty, but I my evidence is
> limited) is that:
[...]
> relied mainly on the tradition of Western transcriptions which started with
> Matteo Ricci in 1605.
  Basically I agree, but I think that work of Nicolas Trigault in
1625 should be mentioned as a competitor to Ricci's system. As for
the initials, Wade-Giles, French system etc. cannot be descendants
of Ricci's system.


> if I have understood correctly, put a greater emphasis on German tradition
> than on other western traditions
  I see this emphasis only in case of the initials. My
argumentation on finals served only to demonstrate that German
transciption was considered during design of the Chinese systems.


> > ............. AFAIK Latinxua was designed in 1930- 1940,
> My information is that it was devised during the 1920s in opposition to GR
> and was first published in Qu Qiubai in 1929.
[...]
> Didn't the Yale system, used by the Americans during WWII, use the same
> system?
  When was Yale system designed? Voiced-unvoiced notation was used
also in GR which was created not later than in 1920s, if I
understand you correctly. AFAIK there were four Yale systems (YS)
for Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean. And they were all
designed only during WWII. I think that YS would be a good evidence
of influence of Chinese systems on Anglophonic ones but not of the
opposite direction.


> May I remind you of what I quoted from the 1960 edition of "Teach Yourself
> Chinese" (which used Wade-Giles):
> Ch.  J as in jeep.
> Ch'. Ch as in cheap.
  I have a number of books from Teach Yourself series and the
accuracy of their phonetics section is very uneven. E.g. in "Teach
Yourself Thai", the author invented a special notation, including
triplets like - |p|, |bp|, |b| (without any useful phonetic
explanation). This |bp| is stands for a sound with quality similar
to PY intial |b| (i.e. unvoiced inaspirate), it may be evident for
Anglophones, but I do not think that it would have been an
effective model for Thai transcription designers in 1920s. Not even
for Russians despite the striking paralelism of digraphs made of
voiced and unvoived sound pairs as {ts.z} and {ch.zs} in Russian
Chinese transcription...

I leave the other parts unanswered in order to facilitate the end
of our
debate.