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

Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> 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 (normally palatalization is
> a sub-phonemic concomitant of a following front vowel).
This surprises me, because when I asked a Turkish woman what a circumflex on an
|a| meant, she explained that it turned the pronunciation from [A] to [a], but
the distinction was disappearing. Well, she used rather more words and less
precise terminology, but that's the geist of it.

                                                    Andreas