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

On 8 Sep 2004 John Cowan <cowan@CCI...> wrote:

> BTW, Turkish has an interesting convention that I didn't know about
> until recently: a circumflex accent on a back vowel means that the
> preceding consonant is palatalized
  This is why Osmanli borrowings in Serb show a palatal consonant
[an alveolo-palatal affricate in central dialects to be correct] in
these positions:
  Cf. English |giaour| < Serb |djaur| /dz\aur/ < Osmanli |ga^vur|.
  (In Hungarian we have more examples of Serb origin.)