Re: Chinese Dialect Question

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 10:33:54PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
> JS Bangs scripsit:
>
> > Sheesh. That defeats most of the purpose of a Romanization, as {Quan}
> > gives me about as much information about the proper pronunciation as the
> > original character does.
> >
> > 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.
I guess there's always IPA if you need that. :-P

> If Portuguese uses x for /S/, contrary to most other languages, it
> isn't so bad to use q for /tS_h/.
Speaking of Portuguese... I find it rather annoying that _r_ is pronounced
[x]. And Spanish always confuses me with _y_ being [dZ] and _j_ being [j]
which is swapped from the English usage. As with using _h_ for [?].

> You can also think of it as a slightly malformed Cyrillic "che", if you
> like.
[snip]

And *I* maintain that a digraph or trigraph should be used for this
purpose. [ts_h] is not so exotic as to warrant the unusual use of _q_. For
example, it could be represented as _tsh_ or _ts_. While I concede that a
romanization is not primarily for foreigners' benefit, I see no reason to
*deliberately* assign odd phonetic values to letters. I mean, V zvtug nf
jryy jevgr Ratyvfu va EBG-13 naq fnl gurer'f abguvat jebat jvgu vg fvapr
vg vf n Yngva-nycunorg ercerfragngvba bs Ratyvfu.


T

--
That's not a bug; that's a feature!

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