Re: Chinese Dialect Question

On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 03:33 , John Cowan wrote:

> JS Bangs scripsit:
>
[snip]
>> So I guess the "awful Romanization" theory is correct.
>
> It's a whole lot better than the romanization of English.  The point of
> romanization is to get a Latin-alphabet representation of the language.
> It's not primarily a phonetic representation for foreigners' benefit.
> If Portuguese uses x for /S/, contrary to most other languages,
But certainly not all.

> it isn't so bad to use q for /tS_h/.
>
> You can also think of it as a slightly malformed Cyrillic "che", if you
> like.
..which, of course, is the origin of this peculiar use of 'q' in Pinyin.
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On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 06:45 , JR wrote:

[snip]

> hundreds of hanzi. Now I know maybe 20. Pinyin though, I never forgot.
> And I
> think it's not THAT weird. Portuguese and Catalan (and Basque???) use |x|
> for /S/.
Yes, Basque does; old Spanish did also.  In the modern language the old |x|
  /S/ and |j| /Z/ have both become /x/ and both written 'j', so 'Mexico' is
now 'Mejico' and 'Don Quixote' has become 'Don Quijote'.

The use of |x| = /S/ is standard in Maltese spelling and is attested in
some
Middle English MSS for English!  I suspect there are other examples.

> And I think Albanian also uses |q| for something similar to the
> Chinese.
The voiceless, palatal plosive /c/.  The Chinese sound is an affricate.

But Albanian romanization is a relatively modern development, dating from
1908.
It arose from schemes for writing Albanian in Greek or Roman letters (or a
mix
of both) put forward by various individuals in the latter part of the 19th
century.
In other words, the Albanian orthography is a con-orthography  :-)

> Not that Albanian represents a Western standard or anything :-/ ,
> but it's not unattested.
Indeed not, otherwise we'd be using using |x| = /dz/ and |xh| = /dZ/.

I must confess I don't like the Pinyin use of |q|, but when it occurs in
words like
'qing' it's not so bad; it's the unfortunate circumstance that it can and
does occur in words like 'quan'.  It really is counter-intuitive for any
one who is
familiar with languages that have use Roman script for centuries to
discover
that |qu| = /ts\_hH/

There are IMO better ways of romanizing Mandarin than Pinyin, but as the
Chinese
government made it official in 1956 I guess we have to get use it.

In any case, I guess Pinyin |q| = /ts\_h/ is IMO no worse than Turkish |c|
  = /dZ/.

Ray
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