Re: OFF: More Pinyin reform...

I went back to the drawing board for variations of Pinyin...  right now the
only reforms I'm sure on are:

ao > au
u" (u-umlaut) > iu
ie > ieh  (see below)

These two are only tentative:

in > ien  (this and the next are only tentative)
ing > ieng

>Why the need to disambiguate here since these sounds occur in mutually
>exclusive environments?
It's optional, and I like it for the sake of clarity.  I'm more inclined to
pronounce "ieh" correctly than "ie", which I'm tempted to proounce as
separate "i-e".

>That's probably good, since there are words like "e2", "goose", and "e4",
>"hungry" which you'll have to deal with separately if you use zero for
>schwa.
I've officially dropped the idea of unwritten schwa.  It was lame.

> > _chi_ becomes _qi_, _zhi_ becomes _ji_, and _shi_ becomes _xi_ -- but
> > there's already a _qi_, _ji_ and _shi_!  What do we do?  Remember that
> > lonely <er> syllable which never begins with anything?  Turns out that
>the
> > <i> after retroflexes sounds like English "er", and Mandarin has the
>same
> > value for <er>.  So let that be our new vowel!  Now we have _qer_, _jer_
>and
> > _xer_; no more ambiguity!
>
>But it creates new ones. The "er" in "er2qie3", "and", and "er2zi", "son"
>does not sound the same as the "i" in "zhi1", which you would render as
>"jer". Too, how to disambiguate "zher4", "here", and "zhi4", "until", both
>of which look like they'll be rendered as "jer" in your system.
Yeah, I did more research and found that out.  An alternative would be to
use "ir" after "sh", "zh", "ch" and "r".  So zhi > jir, and zher > jer.  Or
the Wade-Giles equivalent, which is "ih".

>Pity the poor general reader who might encounter one of these in "Time
>Magazine". Hu Shi, the celebrated scholar, becomes Hu Xr. Go ahead, Mom,
>try
>and pronounce that. I dare ya, I *double* dare ya.
Another bad idea I scrapped.  According to what I have above, the name would
be Hu Xir.

>I'd be interested in seeing your scheme in toto, but it seems that by
>solving a problem or disambiguating in one area, you trade in for a new set
>of problems or ambiguities elsewhere.
And it is true that forming the perfect romanization is like that "Chinese
finger puzzle thing" -- the harder you try to pull your fingers out of it,
the tighter the grip gets.

Now I have the sudden craving for Kung Pao Chicken.

Danny
______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com