Re: USAGE: Help with Chinese phrase

On Fri, 3 Sep 2004 09:04:11 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> To continue my wild speculation in this thread ...
Except that the previous wild speculation was sent only to me, thanks
to the wonders of gmail's reply-to settings.  Apologies.  I am
manually setting it to the list for this message and will try to
remember to do so consistently in future.

Here's the message Andreas originally sent just to me:


Quoting Mark Reed <markjreed@...>:

> But who in the heck designed Pinyin?  Some of those assignments make
> no sense - |r| for /z`/?
[z`] is actually a common realization of Swedish /r/. The Pinyin assignement
makes alot of sense to me ...

> Given |sh| for /s`/, I would have used |zh|
> for /z`/, but no, |zh| is used for /ts`/, while |ch| is used for the
> aspirated version /ts`_h/.  I think I'd have better luck learning
> Maggel. :)
Well, the retroflex series is written as the corresponding alveolar sound with a
trailing -h; s z c are /s ts ts^h/. Both 's' and 'c' are, of course, commonly
used for [ts]-like affricates in Latinly written languages. The particular
assignment might be prompted by the Italian use of 'z' for /dz/ - Mandarin z zh
j are, I'm given to understand, often more-or-less voiced (indeed, I've seen
books writing them as [dz dZ dJ\]), and the signs seem deliberately chosen to
suggest a voiced pronunciation. "Voiced" letters are no doubt effective for
preventing Westerners to aspirate things, and are similarly used for
unaspirated stops; b d g for /p t k/.

The actual 'r' seems a bit lost in the phonemic system - there does not seem to
be a corresponding alveolar.

(And yes, I'm pontification about a language and a writing system about which I
know next to nothing. It's just that the little I know seems, on the whole, to
make an awful lot of sense, so I thought pointing this sense out to Mark might
still be helpful.)