John Cowan wrote:
> Douglas Koller scripsit:
> > (to hear my stepmother pronounce "karaoke" as "carry-yokie"
> > makes my flesh crawl).
> Get used to it. That will be the standard English pronunciation soon
> enough, if it isn't already.
I suppose if I've withstood "La Choy" commercials, I can deal with this
<shudder>.
> > Where would one do this?
> In newspapers, on the Internet, etc. The trouble is that if one does
> know a little Chinese, trying to decode pinyin stripped of tones is
> about 4 times harder than with tones, which is damned hard enough.
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. 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.
> > 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)?
> Conceptual unity. "Ma2" looks like a word with a number attached.
> "Mah" looks like a word. It would be easy for alphabet users to lose
> the apparently unnecessary digit, just as it's easy to lose the
> tone mark. Losing a whole letter is far less likely.
Okay, I can accept this. Still, I have this gnawing feeling we view the
role of romanization differently.
Kou