Re: John Cowan mangles Pinyin again

"Daniel A. Wier" wrote:

> I compared a bunch of Chinese words with
> their Korean and Japanese equivalent, and found that many of these borrowed
> into the latter two (and pronounced in Cantonese and other "Chinese"
> languages) -- many end in <k>.
Generally speaking the checked syllables of the ru tone in Middle
Chinese got distributed semi-randomly among the other three tones
when final stops were lost.  If there truly are more of them
in the 4th tone (= Middle 3rd tone) category, I'd be interested
in the evidence.

(Note: Middle 1st tone split into Mandarin 1st and 2nd, Middle 2nd
became Mandarin 3rd, Middle 3rd became Mandarin 4th.  Some people
number the four Middle tones 1, 3, 5, 7 for this reason).

> So, tone four could be marked with an apostrophe: _ma'_ for _ma4_ "scold".
The objection here is that ' is used in all (except Yale?) romanizations
to divide syllables when the "natural" division is wrong,
thus Chang'an to avoid reading Chan'gan, or Xi'an to avoid reading Xian.

> Except what
> do you do with the so-called "tone five", the indistinct tone?
Toneless syllables are very few in number, though very common.
I say write them as if in the first tone, and live with the ambiguity.

> I used to be somewhat familar with Guoyeu Romatzyh...
Hard to hold it in your head, isn't it?

--

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