Re: USAGE: Help with Chinese phrase

Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> Retroflexion is basically a Beijing regional feature that drops off
> as one moves away from the capital, and basically doesn't exist in
> most of the Mandarin-speaking area except as an artificially learned
> feature.  People who don't have it pronounce sh, zh, ch as s, z, c
> respectively, don't pronounce -r at all, and I'm not sure what they
> do with r-.  Using -h- as a sort of retroflexion diacritic makes
> sense in this context, whereas there is little connection between sh and r.
To continue my wild speculation in this thread ...

Wade-Giles, which is IIRC based on southernly variants of Mandarin, uses 'j',
and I've seen books transcribing /r/ as [Z]. I'll therefore hazard they use [Z]
for r- in non-retroflex areas.

                                                          Andreas

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