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

Ray Brown scripsit:

> But |ü| is used only after |l| and |n|. In all other instances PY writes
> [y] simply as |u|.
I think that's a straightforward simplification, like writing -un for -uen.
There is no [u]/[y] contrast except after [l] and [n], so no reason to
use the diacritic and get involved with the annoyances of double
diacritics.

> By the 1950s the Chinese People's Republic could find |ü| = [y] in many
> other places, including Turkey - but I am *not* suggesting Turkish
> influence!
>
> It may be argued that historically all the other uses of |ü| = [y] are
> ultimately derived from german practice - but that IMO is an entirely
> different matter.
I think the evidence is in fact clear that the Turkish vowels with
diaeresis are derived directly, not merely indirectly, from German
conventions.

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).

> The whole debate about the phonemic status of [E] and [o] is not settled
> AFAIK. I think most (all?) agree that [E]is an allophone of the mid
> central unrounded vowel [??] (CXS [@])
Except that there is a contrast in the case of these two interjections
/E/ and /o/ vs. the ordinary words /ei/ and /uo/.   Interjections are
often exempt from the ordinary rules of a language: consider the
English interjections [t!-t!] and /S/.

> My wonder, indeed, is why the "apostrophe system" ever got into Wade-Giles.
Probably because it was felt to be more phonetically accurate
(i.e. closer to the European uses of consonants).

> I always thought that the Gwoyeu Romatzyh idea of having tones built into
> the spelling rather than denoted by diacritics was a good idea (anglophone
> Newspapers always ignore diacritics); but I confess I thought GR made it
> too complicated. I would have done it more simply.
Well, there's always the "append one to four v's to each syllable"
tonal spelling.  :-)

But after much playing around with it about three years ago, I found a
very simple scheme devised by Lon Diehl and promulgated on the Net by
Mark Bosley, which I just loooove:

tone 1: tang
tone 2: ttang
tone 3: taang
tone 4: tahng

Details at http://my.execpc.com/~mbosley/pts.html .

--
"How they ever reached any conclusion at all    cowan@ccil.org>
is starkly unknowable to the human mind."       http://www.reutershealth.com
        --"Backstage Lensman", Randall Garrett  http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

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