Re: Bopomofo and pinyin

At 5:42 pm +0100 22/1/00, BP Jonsson wrote:
>At 23:30 -0800 21.1.2000, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
>>
>>I've voiced my opinion on this before. Gwoyeu Romatzu is hell on earth. Yale
>>is okay if you have nothing else, but for me, pinyin is more streamlined and
>>looks less hokey. I guess it's just what I'm used to; Wade-Giles is a little
>>antiquated but works as well as pinyin. Bopomofo is also cool, but isn't
>>romanization, of course.
......
>
>Pinyin is an advance over both Yale and WG, and even though I like the idea
>of "tone spelling" I don't like the way it is done in GR.
I don't know enough about the Yale system to comment, but I agree Pinyin is
certainly the an advance over WG.  But I agree about tone spelling; as soon
as something becomes a diacritic, anglophones assume it's not important &
leave the things out.

I like GR's aim of indicating tone in the actual spelling, but the way it's
done seems unnecessarily complicated to me.  I once used to devise simpler
tone-spelling systems for Mandarin as a change from conlanging  :)

>What I really can't stomach is the PY use of {q}.
I know.  And using {j} invariably makes most of our newscasters
mispronounce Beijing as [bej'ZiN].   There seems to be an assumption in the
liguistically naive, but educated, Brits that "foreign {j} = [Z]".  Might
it have something to do with that fact that French is only foreign language
taught in most UK schools?  But we can't blame the Chinese for the sloppy
habits of British newscasters!

I also think it a weakness that PY imports the double use of {h} which,
thanks to the Norman scribes, we have inherited in English, namely: as a
consonant (in Mandarin [x]), and as a consonant modifier (in Mandarin to
mark the voicless retroflex {ch}, {zh} and {sh} - the voiced {r} not
'needing' the modifier).   It could've been done differently (all my
various schemes IIRC did so).

>>I'm still waiting for John to develop the definitve
>>system :)
I've no doubt John could do this very well.  But I guess the final word has
to be with the Chinese themselves.

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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