Re: Pharingials, /l/ vs. /r/ in Southeast Asia

Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>:

> At 11:21 6.2.2004, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> >'Cerebral stop'? Explanation of origin of that term?
>
> Sloppy translation of the Sanskrit term for 'retroflex'.
Ah ...

A better translation would be?

> >It may amuse you, Ray, btw, that a book of my father's on Qin Shi Huangdi,
> in
> >the section on pinyin pronunciation, transcribes 'sh' as 'sjr'. This of
> course
> >assumes the convention that 'sj' in transcribed Furn is [S].
>
> That's a lovely one!  How does it distinguish _q_ and _x_, since they
> oughtta both end up as _tj_ in transkribed Furn.
The 'q' as 'tj', but I'm not positive what they used for 'x'. May have
been 'sj'. But it wasn't so much a systematic retranscription as a rough and
ready guide to pronouncing pinyin words occuring in the book roughly
correctly - not all letters and digraphs were explained.

"Qin Shi Huangdi" became _Tjin Sjri Hoangdi_.

Is that "trans_k_ribed" intentional, btw?

                                                  Andreas

PS Is there any good reason that pinyin 'y' and 'w' become 'i' and 'u' when
preceeded by a cosyllabic consonant?

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