Re: Chinese Dialect Question

on 9/30/03 11:17 PM, H. S. Teoh at hsteoh@QUICKFUR.ATH.CX wrote:

> On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 10:56:39PM -0400, JR wrote:
>> on 9/30/03 9:20 PM, H. S. Teoh at hsteoh@QUICKFUR.ATH.CX wrote:
> [snip]
>>> This is one of the things that turn me off about Pinyin.
>>
>> Am I the only one who likes it? It has a very distinctive look, and in some
>> ways it's very well designed, IMHO. And you do get used to it after a little
>> while. It's easier than memorizing thousands of hanzi anyway.
>
> To me, if you care about distinctive look, learn hanzi. :-) Romanization
> should at least not deliberately be contrary to common Western phonetic
> values for the letters.
I'll give you that hanzi are distinctive. But it's really too much
information for my brain to hold onto if I'm not actually using them
regularly (ok, and even if I am). A couple of years ago I must have known
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/. And I think Albanian also uses |q| for something similar to the
Chinese. Not that Albanian represents a Western standard or anything :-/ ,
but it's not unattested.

> [snip]
>>> He's pronouncing it right. _Q_ in Pinyin is pronounced something like
>>> [ts_h].
>>
>> Yes, I forgot the aspiration. But /ts_h/ would be spelled |c|, no? |x q j|
>> represent the alveo-palatals.
> [snip]
>
> I have the misfortune (or perhaps not-so-misfortune) of growing up with a
> dialect of Mandarin where all of these are allophonous, so while I can
> *hear* the difference when a Beijing speaker says it, I have a hard time
> producing it myself for the right words and keeping track of how they are
> romanized.
When you say they're allophonous, you mean the dentals and corresponding
alveopalatals?


and on 9/30/03 10:56 PM, H. S. Teoh at hsteoh@QUICKFUR.ATH.CX wrote:

[snip]
> I'm all for sticking with the original transcription, which, although
> imperfect, is at least not pathological, like Pinyin's usage of _q_ for
> [ts] and _x_ for a *sibilant* (I believe [s`] or some variant thereof), of
> all things. I wish they'd spend their creative efforts on uniquely
> representing vowels like [M] (*) or differentiating between [@] and [E],
> instead of coming up with such silly uses of _q_ and _x_.
>
> (*) Which is currently represented as _i_, as is [i], making it impossible
> to know what is the right pronunciation unless you already know Mandarin
> to begin with.
Not so impossible! |i| is pronounced as [1] (or [M], I guess) after
alveopalatals |x q j| and postalveolar |sh ch zh|. The combination |ri| is
... something else really weird. Other than that, |i| after any other
consonant is [i]. Actually I suppose you could say they're allophones of one
phoneme, in which case it makes perfect sense to write them the same way. Of
course ... if your consonants have been merging, the vowel quality isn't
going to be predictable anymore. Perhaps that's the source of your
frustration.

Vowels _in combination_ do pretty funny things in pinyin though, I'll admit.

As for sibilants, they fall into a nice pattern:

                fric.       asp. affr.      unasp. affr.
dental          s           c               z
alveopalatal    x           q               j
postalveolar    sh          ch              zh

Given that these do all have distinct pronunciations in the standard, to
replace e.g. |q| with |ts| as you suggested elsewhere wouldn't be
appropriate - one would think it it was dental rather than alveopalatal. You
could use |tx| I guess, but it messes up the system. Perhaps something like
|sy cy zy| for the alveopalatals would work. I'd say to simply use |si ci
zi| for those, since it looks nicer and |i| is already often used
redundantly after the alveopalatals in pinyin anyway, but there would result
some ambiguities.

--
Josh Roth

http://www34.brinkster.com/fuscian/index.html

"Farewell, farewell to my beloved language,
Once English, now a vile orangutanguage."
-Ogden Nash

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