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

On 7 Sep 2004 Ray Brown <ray.brown@FREE...> wrote:

> > they were). I do not want to extend this debate immoderately,
>
> Nor do I, as I do not think we will reach any definite conclusion.
> I think we had best 'agree to disagree' over this.
  For the above reason, I will try to limit myself in reflecting.


> It does, but the GT treatment of the dental, retroflex & palatal
> series does not strike me as having much bearing on the Pinyin
> system:
>
>                   IPA          GT                 Pinyin
>dental         ts ts=CA=B0 s      ds ts s            z  c  s
>retroflex      t=CA‚ t=CA‚=CA=B0 =CA‚  =CA   dsch tsch sch j    zh ch sh=
 r
>palatal        t=C9• t=C9•=CA=B0 =C9•      dj tj hs           j  q  x
  You are right here, but the task of the Chinese designers was to
create one-letter initials (plus possible accent characters for
aspirate, retroflex etc. quality). Therefore every predecessor
system should be -- imaginally -- re-designed with monographic
onsets before thainking it into consideration. In German |ds|~[ts]
pair can be easily replaced by |z] and |c|, but Frech and English
system have no such alternatives. (I will exclude Russian
transciption here, because it had to be transcribed before into
Latin script. On this point we must choose whether Cyrillic letter
{ts} is to be transcribed by German-dominated Central European
convention, or by western Anglo-Romance way. In this phase we face
also German, English, French etc. systems.)


> > /z`/ as {sh-}* ~ {zh-}, while PY does not: |sh-| ~ |r-|.
> > Moreover, as far I know, RT does not distiguish between Pinyin
> > |hs-| and |s-|, it uses {s-}** for both onsets. The same is
> > true for PY |z-| > ~ |j-| vs. common RT {ts.z-}.
>
> Arguably, as I said in a mail I sent last evening, the palatals
> are allophones of the dental series. The RT is by no means alone in
> treating them this way.
  (Just a remark: IMHO they are not allophones, in fact, they are
homophones, i.e. historically different syllables that are merged
into prensent-day Peking dialect.) Here I see an important point:
all the systems, except Russian, uses a _third_ variant for the two
merged syllables. On the contrary, Russian extended one orginal
variant in a "pars pro toto" way. If the design would have been
based on Russian influence, PY solution would be either |s| or |h|
(as well as |z| or |g| etc.) instead of the third |hs| (|j|). One
of the most particular characteristics of RT was left out of
consideration here.


> I do not claim that the RT had any _direct_ influence on Pinyin;
> what influence it had came through Latinxua.
  Let me use some loose terminology here and let me denote the
common set of Pinyin and both their endogenous predecessors
respectively with a common term as "Pinyin". But I do not see the
Russian elements even in Latinxua (e.g. no common denotation of
palatalized onset pairs |g| : |z|, |k| : |c|, |h(x)| : |s|; |sh| :
|r(h)| pair is not a voiced-unvoiced orthographical pair).


> All true - which makes me even more of the opinion that the Maoist
> government were concerned basically with the earlier _Chinese_
> transcriptions.
  Then let me rephrase the question: What kind(s) of conventions
influenced e.g. Latinxua?
  (I do not continue the thread on politics, however I do not see
it as simple as you. Mao had a strong opposition in the party and
he was gradually pushed into the background. The Cultural
Revolution was Mao's break-out with the help of rural redicalism.
It was against also previous communist era.)


> >   Hungarian uses, too, but this is due to the German cultural
> > influence (the early universities of the area were in Germany).
>
> But that's going way back in history.
[...]
> I did not say it was! I merely pointed out that by 1950, there was
> nothing particularly German about |c| =3D /ts/. Why, that is the
> Esperanto convention!
  The latter is an interesting question. I would be significant to
know the ideological status of Esperanto in 1950 in the Soviet
Union and in China. (I am not aware of this.) An "Esperantoist"
designer could have been a mediator of |c|, however in this case I
wonder why the accented consonants were not mediated, too.

  You may call it "back in history", but I, as an inhabitant of
that area, still feel this cultural influence. And let me mention
that the significant part of the Soviet elite was of Jewish origin.
Their native bias was German. (Even Zamenhof's: the /g/ ~ /h/ ~ /x/
triplet of Esperanto reflects German phonemicity, not Slavonic.)
Russian influence could mean German influence in fact...

  And I feel still important that German is the only language in
question where both graphemes |c| and |z| may denote alveolar
affricates.


> No alphabetic system AFAIK consistently uses monographs; some use
> them more than others. (I do not consider the Zhuyin Fuhao, aka
> Bopomofo, to be an alphabet)
  I treated Russian {dz} in my argumentation as a monograph (i.e.
equivalent of Cyrillic {z}), since it is only the Grazhdanka
solution of Church Slavonic monograph letter "dze^lo". Even {dzh}
could be interpreted as a functional monograph. These are native
Slavonic monophonemic solutions. But RT chose suprising solutions
here instead of native ones, like {ts.z} and {ch.zh}. They are not
even monophonemic. IMHO, this extreme markedness of these graphemes
should be reflected in BL or PY (or in other transciprions as well)
if there would be significant Russian Slavonic contribution.


> But |=FC| is used only after |l| and |n|. In all other instances PY
> writes [y] simply as |u|.
  It is true but it does not affect the merits of my argumentation:
PY uses circumflex accent on |e| to mark front pronunciation. They
could use circumflex even on front |u| (that is in contrast with
back |u|) or simply maintain Latinxua solution. Umlaut here reveals
that German notation/orthography was taken into consideration and
it could be preferred even to previous Chinese conventions such as
Latinxua |y| (even despite of the political-ideological
considerations).


> By the 1950s the Chinese People's Republic could find |=C3=A5| =3D [y]
> in many other places, including Turkey - but I am *not*
> suggesting Turkish influence!
  Turkish influence can be ruled out only because no other Turkish
characteristics can be observed in Chinese transcriptions (however,
dotless "i" could solve some problems with ambiguous |-i| coda).
And they not were present in China, while Germans had concessions.

  (It is a further question whether there is a correlation between
Turkish choice of |=FC| and |=F6|, and the orthographic traditions of
the nearest nations with Latin script that have these sounds: i.e.
Hungarian and German. In Hungarian they are definitely a German
borrowing, thus I think Turkish |=FC| and |=F6| are also such.)


> The whole debate about the phonemic status of [E] and [o] is not
> settled AFAIK.
  You are right but I did not mention the syllabical vowels, only
the ones found in interjections and written oddly. E.g. this [o]
occurs in itself without labial onset.


> I think most (all?) agree that [E]is an allophone of the mid
> central unrounded vowel [=C9™] (CXS [@])
  This |e^| =3D [E] interjection I mentioned is an interchangeable
phonetic variant of interjections |ei| with various tonemes. In
syllabical situation, you could be right here, however -- if I
remember correctly -- [E] is _also_ an allophone for [a] e.g. in
codas |-ian|, |-uan| (AFAIK the latter can be pronounced both as
/yan/ and /yEn/. [[I use X-SAMPA]]).

----

> It is interesting that the French system of Ecole fran=C3=A7ais
> d'Extr=C3=AAme-Orient adopted the same sort of solution as Beila,
> namely:
> - ts, ts' and s represent palatals before [i] and [y] but
> dentals elsewhere;
> - k, k' and h represent palatals before [i] and [y] but velars
> elsewhere.
  According to my sources, the French system is the oldest one used
recently. It reflects an older, dialectal pronunciation. (Possibly
its origin goes back to the system of Nicolas Trigault created in
1625.) This scheme is adopted also in Hungarian philoligical
transcription. Some interesting observations can be taken by
comparison with Japanese pronunciation, e.g. Chinese PY readings
|jian4| are borrowed both as |ken| and as |sen|. See a Middle
Chinese etymological dictionary at <http://www-
personal.umich.edu/~wbaxter/etymdict.html>


> Indeed, it is even further complicated by the fact that the
> retroflex series are not found either before [i] and [y], therefore
> it could be argued that the palatals are allophones of the
> retroflex affricates and fricative
  Yes, however the situation is the same with alveolar non-plosives
and velar non-plosives. Thus three possible underlying structures
could have a common surface representation. However alveolar and
velar non-plosives form triples similarly to the palatal series,
but there are four retroflex onsets. If we would bind palatal
intials to retroflex ones, syllables with |r-| would be orphaned.
You may consider a rule like [+front] -> [-front] / [+retroflex] _
though, to solve the problem.


> > An interesting point is that Ricci IIRC used _b d g_ the same
> > way PY does.
>
> That's very interesting. If you recall rightly, it makes the
> German theory of the origin even less likely IMO. So the tradition
> of using _b d g_ this way possibly goes back 4 centuries!
  It is possible -- nor I excluded Italian influence on |z| erlier
-- but I wonder whoever preserved this tradition for centuries.
Chinese interest in romanization is fairly recent. And it became
extinct in Latin systems, except German.

Reply