Re: USAGE: Help with Chinese phrase

On Saturday, September 4, 2004, at 09:17 , Tamas Racsko wrote:

> On 3 Sep 2004 Ray Brown <ray.brown@FREE...> wrote:
>> On Thursday, September 2, 2004, at 09:38 , Mark Reed wrote:
>>
>> [smip]
>>> But who in the heck designed Pinyin?
>>
>> A committee of the People's Republic of China (it was approved by the
>> Communist National Assembly in 1958).
>
>   I think the consonant (onset) notation was heavily influenced by
> the German transcription.
Maybe somewhere along the line, but not directly, I think.

>   Germans trascribed aspirate -- inaspirate contrast as unvoiced --
> voiced (a number of German dialects know inaspirate unvoiced mediae
> in constrast with aspirate unvoiced tenues) as in current Pinyin
True.

> while the other systems used a diacritical apostrophe for the
> aspiration (or simply neglegted the denotation).
Only partly true. _Some_ other systems, notably Wade-Giles, used the
apostrophe. The Russian system, however, used its Cyrillic letters in
exactly the same way that Germans used the Roman letters. More to the
point, Gwoyeu Romatzyh used the convention of transcribing the unaspirated
plosives & affricates by the symbols normally used for voiced sounds in
western use.

I would be extremely surprised, given the politics of post-WWII years, if
the People's Republic had been influenced by any German practice. My
understanding is that Pinyin is based mainly on Latinxua but takes certain
GR ideas on board. Surely this convention is one of the GR contributions
to Pinyin.

It may well be of course that this convention in GR was ultimately due to
earlier German practice.


>   The "monographic" principle and the German tradition led to the
> choice of "z" and "c". Both letters have /ts/ quality in German
> ("z" always, "c" before front vowels). For non-Germans, "z" implies
> a quality of voicedness, therefore it was choosen for the
> unaspirate variant.
I think this is pushing it a bit. |c| is used consistently to represent
/ts/ in all the Slavonic Roman orthographies and the Russian Cyrillic
transcription also used monographs. Again I strongly suspect the
communists of the People's Republic were much more influenced by Slavonic
practice. The use of |z| = [dz] is found in Italian (tho I don't suppose
the People's republic was unduly influenced by that).

> It was the "monographic" principle again to
> choose "x-" for the English-German "hs-" digraph.
Yep - on I this agree - but, as you rightly say, it is un-German. And the
use of |j| as an affricate is most distinctly un-German (but not
un-English).

>   After the above was done, two onset consonants still had no their
> own letter: /ts\/ and /z`/. And there were only a small number of
> unallocated Latin letter to choose from. Letter "q" was choose for
> /ts\/ either for the Albanian-Chinese friendship or for its
> resemblance to a Cyrillic letter;
...or both. But wasn't |q| used this way in Latinxua? I would've been
surprised if Albanian had contibuted to that.

> it is not too important to know
> the exact reason because it was only a secondary solution for the
> "odds and ends". The basis of "r" = /z`/ assignment was IMHO the
> phonetic similarity of /z`/ and /r`/,
Well, yes, of course. It was used this way in GR - I'm not sure about
Latinxua.

My understanding (I'm not a sinolog) is that:
- Pinyin follows from a long tradition of Romanizations based on western
transcriptions which began with Matteo Ricci's scheme of 1605;
- Pinyin was devised by the government of the People's Republic in the
early years of the 1950s and was broadly based on the Latinxua system but
also used elements of Gwoyeu Romatzyh.

I imagine many western schemes had some ultimate input. The writing of the
diphthong /aw/ as |ao| is surely an Italian convention and, I guess, goes
right back to Matteo Ricci's transcriptions.

BTW I am very familiar with both Pinyin and Gwoyeu Romatzyh, but have
_very_ little information on Latinxua. A quick search on Google wasn't
helpful. Does anyone ave more information on this scheme?

Ray
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"They are evidently confusing science with technology."
UMBERTO ECO				September, 2004

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