Re: Ancient Chinese?

On Mon, 4 Jan 1999 11:10:35 +0000 "BP.Jonsson" <bpj@...> writes:
>It's Karlgrens transcription system.  Accents over letters are
>supposed to
>indicate palatalization.  The "ayin" is a Greek spiritus asper* (rough
>breathing in English, IIANM) and indicates what K. called aspiration,
>but
>we now would call breathy voice when talking about voiced sounds.  K's
>reconstructions are much called into question -- not in general, but
>in
>details, like what the phonetic nature of his reconstructed
>sound-entities
>really was.  The only thing everyone seems to agree about is that he
>reconstructed more sounds than there were phonemes in the language.
>Being
>trained in the Swedish dialectologists' tradition, where it was a
>virtue to
>distinguish the most minute shades of sounds he didn't have a lot of
>understanding for phonemic theories!
Ah, thanks!

>*Semiticists also borrowed these Greek signs, but for other purposes,
>as
>you see.  Greek ' was probably alif/glottal stop, but Greek ` was
>*certainly* an ordinary [h].  These signs should properly look
>different
>from quotes (namely like semi-circles).
I don't think i've ever seen an alef written as a semi circle, but i have
seen a `ayin that looked when i saw it just like a superscripted "c" (i
guess that's the semi-circle).


-Stephen (Steg)

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