Re: CHAT: Chinese romanization

John Cowan wrote:
> 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.
But surely with Pinyin all the apostrophes, etc. can be preserved in
educational texts and beginners' texts.  An analogy is accents in
Spanish.  Most of the time, the written accents are unnecessary (e.g.,
the suffix -ico always has antepenultimate stress).  It's very helpful
for learners to know the correct pronunciation, but there is rarely any
chance of ambiguity or mispronunciation for experienced speakers, since
the accents can usually be figured out.