Further digression (was Re: Can realism be retro-fitted?)

--- Benct Philip Jonsson <conlang@...> xi¨¨ le:

> <digression> Writing /ly/ and /ny/ as _lyu_ and
> _nyu_ would be perfectly possible without other
> changes of Pinyin, and would do away with the need
> for _¨¹_.</digression>
But then you'd get ambiguity across word boundaries,
especially because few people bother to pay attention
to spacing in writing Pinyin (because H¨¤nzi, of
course, almost never uses spaces).

For the sake of example, let's use /sh¨¡ny¨²/
[s\an.Hy], 'at the mountain', and /sh¨¡ni¨²/
[s\a.nioU], 'kill the cow'. However, these examples
are highly contrived (as in, I doubt these phrases are
even grammatically correct), and only show up between
/n/ and the /iu/ and /yu/ pair anyways.

Personally, I think it makes more sense to write the
syllables /n¨¹/ and /l¨¹/ as /nuu/ and /luu/,
respectively. It leads to no major ambiguities in
writing, even if you ignore spacing entirely, and it's
the usual work-around used in Chinese word-processors
(those that use a Pinyin input, anyways).




	
		
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