Re: CHAT: Chinese romanization

John Cowan wrote:

> 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.
Ah, I've been talking about (for example) Time magazine dropping Chinese
names or peppering an article with a couple of choice phrases like "sige
xiandaihua" (the Four Modernizations) to sound de rigueur. You seem to
be talking about encountering whole stretches of romanized Chinese text.
While I personally don't recall meeting that kind of text outside of an
academic context, where tone marking is rigorously applied, if you do
run into such situations, I see your point.

> I learned a lot from Li & Thompson, which would have been a closed
> book if it had used hanzi.
I don't have my L&T handy by, but surely they don't cavalierly drop tone
markers.

> 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.
This is a legitimate beef which I myself carped about last year
regarding Taiwanese road signs. If you didn't already read Chinese, the
romanization was next to useless -- which defeats the whole purpose of
it as an aid to non-speakers.

> 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.
Making everyone happy. Let me know when the a la Yi system is developed.
'Til then, I still say fie on GR.

Kou