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Re: Chinese Dialect Question

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 1, 2003, 3:15
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. [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. T -- It only takes one twig to burn down a forest.

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Joe <joe@...>