Re: CHAT: Chinese romanization

John Cowan wrote:

> Douglas Koller wrote:
> > If the point of romanization is to make the Chinese language more
> > accessible to non-speakers, it fails.
> I don't think *any* romanization scheme could do that.  :-)  Besides,
> which non-speakers?  The vowels are bad for English-speakers, but
> then all Latin vowels are bad for English speakers.
Well, there's just so much you can do to keep non-speakers from mangling
a language (to hear my stepmother pronounce "karaoke" as "carry-yokie"
makes my flesh crawl - she can spell it, though). The only really
egregious error I hear with pinyin is that the j-q-x series all get
pronounced like a mushy [Z] (it's foreign, so we'll give it an exotic
quasi-French sound). "And the weather in Beijing (/beZIN/) will be..."
Yech. Guys, English has a "j".

> > If GYRMT can be "picked
> > up" at all, I doubt it's with speed, and I suspect it's more likely that
> > you have to hunker down and consciously "learn" it.
> It's a lot simpler than most traditional spelling systems in Latin-alphabet
> languages, except those (Croatian, Spanish, Czech, Turkish) which
> are recently adopted or reformed.
Sure, but it's not goodness to be better than the worst (reminds me of
the old joke: How do the French spell "Fido"? Phai"deaux
[Phailledeaux?]). Anyway, my point is this: If GYRMT were the official
writing system of Chinese, I'd say, "Okay, tough luck, sit down, eat
your spinach, and learn it -- this is the writing system they use." But
the official writing system is characters. Romanization, as I see it, is
meant to be an auxiliary system - either as a springboard to characters
or an intermediary between the characters and languages that use the
Roman alphabet. As such, GYRMT is unnecessarily complicated --
romanization is supposed to be an aid, not another linguistic obstacle
one has to overcome.

> Its chief virtue is that it "locks in" tones.
So everyone says. I don't have a problem with this in theory.

> All too often, Pinyin
> and W-G just leave off the tone marks, which certainly impedes
> learning for CSLs and sometimes leaves natives confused too, by
> all reports.
Where would one do this? I don't recall seeing any CSL teaching
materials that do this. The only place I can think of where this was
done was in my university library card catalogue for Chinese titles.
This is simply so that you can alphabetize them into the catalogue. It
presupposes that you have the Chinese words in mind (not an unreasonable
assumption), and the characters are also on the card to clear up
possible ambiguities. Other contexts? I doubt John Q. Public really
cares when he picks up Time magazine that "Jiang Zemin" is
first-tone/second-tone/second-tone.

> Yi and Hmong tonal spelling represent the tone in the last letter or
> two, which helps quite a bit.
You'd hear a lot less kvetching from this end if GYRMT did that.

> ObConScript:  How about a Pinyin-based scheme with final tone
> letters?  Things like -s, -h, -x would be plausible (-h is silent
> in many Western languages, and silent -s and -x appear in French).
> Though I admit -ngx is unaesthetic (worse yet, -ngrx).
No major problem with this, but how is that much different from tacking
a number on the end like we in cyberspace do (well, maybe faster typing
speeds, but I'm not sure)?

Kou