Re: OFF: More Pinyin reform...

>From: DOUGLAS KOLLER <LAOKOU@...>
>Okay on "au", I guess. I think Yale does something similar.
>ü > iu raises some problems I think. A) There will now be ambiguous
>syllables as you combine "niu2", "cow", with "nü3", "woman",
Oh no, I'd be calling a woman a cow!  Better scrap that one... :P

>how? B) There are syllables like "nüe4", "malaria", out there which by your
>system will become a slightly unwieldy "niueh". C) Are you only going to
>use
>"iu" where "ü" occurs in pinyin or everywhere the /y/ sound occurs? This
>will generate forms like xiueh, qiueh, and jiueh as well as niueh and
>liueh.
>How will you disambiguate pinyin "xu1", "need", and "xiu1", "rest", if you
>do that?
I'll get back to you on that.  One new idea I have is to use "y" as a vowel
in place of u-umlaut.  But I still have to do a lot more analysis of all the
possible syllables.

>You'd have to check, but I think Yale does something similar.
Hey, what is the Yale translit system?  All I know is Pinyin and Wade-Giles.
  Yale is commonly used for Cantonese, right?

>If you're using "eh" for the "real e" sound then why would "ih" represent
>the retroflex as opposed to the "real i" sound?
That's what W-G has, I don't know...

>Too true. But isn't that true of romanizing anything other than, well,
>Roman? If there's a pathological aversion to diacritics, then one ends up
>with di- and trigraphs from hell or schemes like English's silent "e".
>Strip
>Polish of its diacritics, and wouldn't you have to do back flips to mash it
>into the Roman alphabet?
Polish kinda does in a few instances -- look at "szcz" for instance.  And
Gaelic came up with some weird conventions, like words beginning with "bp",
"dt", "gc" and "bhf".

>Back to Chinese. Trust me, the Central Committee isn't paying me commission
>to tout the virtues of pinyin, really it isn't. But since that's the system
>in place, anything that intends to replace it is going to have to be really
>whiz-bang in my book. As an example:
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".  But like I said, I
still need to learn Yale.

Danny
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