Re: OFF: More Pinyin reform...

From: "Daniel A. Wier"

> Hey, what is the Yale translit system?  All I know is Pinyin and
Wade-Giles.
>   Yale is commonly used for Cantonese, right?
There is a Yale system for Cantonese -- too many h's leaping about IM*E*SHO.
But there is also a Yale system for Mandarin, kind of a watered down version
of pinyin, claiming, I guess, to be a little more intuitive. I only had to
use it for one semester over fifteen years ago, so I'm no longer competent
in the system, but I think it used "aw" for pinyin "ao", "sy" for "xi", and
so on. I mean it was alright, workable, and all, but aesthetically I wasn't
reallly into it, and having teethed on pinyin, I found it a little jarring.
I guess if you started your studies in the Yale transcription, you might not
have a problem with it. Anyway, I think it comes up with several solutions
similar to yours.

> You're right.  My purpose here was really just to invent a personal
translit
> system, not to supplant Pinyin.  I've found Pinyin to be the most
efficient,
> if not most accurate.  I'm thinking of marrying the old Wade-Giles with
> Pinyin.  In a lot of cases I translated Bopomofo symbol by symbol, so I
got
> "ien" instead of "in", and "ueng" instead of "ong".
A decent approach, but keeping the "e" in there is deceptive since it looks
like W-G "ien" which is pinyin "ian". Also, while "en" is the name of that
symbol in BPMF, the "e" sound falls out when combined with other vowels. If
a child were spelling "pin" in BPMF, s/he would say, "po-yi-en, pin". As for
BPMF's use of "üng" for pinyin "iong", this is my only gripe with the system
(and I'm a Bopomofo kinda guy) -- not especially intuitive, sounding it out
doesn't necessarily lead one to "iong", but I guess they had to use it to
keep the max number of symbols per syllable down to three.

> But like I said, I
> still need to learn Yale.
A quick search found these sites; the third cursorily looks the most useful.
The second says that Yale is the most widely used in Taiwan to teach Chinese
to foreigners -- that is so much stuff and nonsense.

http://library.fgcu.edu/iclc/cliej/cl4ao.htm#append

http://www.wlu.edu/~hhill/tlit.html

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~zac/pinconv.htm

Kou