Re: CHAT: Chinese romanization

Douglas Koller scripsit:

> I'm still having difficulty seeing where this matters. In newspapers, on
> the Internet, etc., the majority of the target audience is going to
> divide into two camps: those who know Chinese and understand what the
> pinyin is alluding to and those who don't know Chinese and neither
> understand nor care about tonal distinctions (trotting out my parents
> again -- they probably recognize Xinhua as a news agency and think of it
> in the same light as Reuters or TASS.
Again, I emphasize the phrase "know a little Chinese".  I know a little,
in the same sense that I know a little French: my ability to read
French is not impeded by losing the accents (though it *is* impeded
by brain-dead 8th-bit stripping), whereas I can make almost nothing of
Chinese without tone marking of some kind.  (To be sure, I know a whole
lot more French vocab than Chinese simply by virtue of speaking English
and knowing a little Latin).

I an ead Nglish ine ith ll nitial etters issing, but hardly French;
Chinese without tones gives me similar trouble.

> It is not pivotal information that
> it's first tone/second tone or that it means "New China"). That the
> non-academic media do not see it as their role to cater to or give a
> linguistic leg-up to the minority "know a little Chinese" crowd does not
> seem unreasonable to me.
True enough.  But if tones were in the spelling a la GR or my
proposed tone suffixes a la Yi, that information *would* be preserved
automatically, because alphabet users don't normally drop whole letters.
IMHO the great advantage of pinyin over W-G is precisely this
robustness: half the time the essential apostrophes of W-G get lost,
and then we lose not only tone but phonemic distinctions as well.
Result: gibberish squared.

> Okay, I can accept this. Still, I have this gnawing feeling we view the
> role of romanization differently.
Probably true.  For me, romanization makes Chinese accessible to me.
I learned a lot from Li & Thompson, which would have been a closed
book if it had used hanzi.

--
John Cowan                                      cowan@ccil.org
                e'osai ko sarji la lojban.