Re: USAGE: Help with Chinese phrase

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. They had colonies in Southern China and
they left behind their breweries and transcription system there
after their withdrawal.

  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
while the other systems used a diacritical apostrophe for the
aspiration (or simply neglegted the denotation).

  It seems that it was a principle by the design of Pinyin that
onset consonant digraphs are to be avoided. Except, of course, the
retroflex diacritic-like marker "h". This marker was also of German
inspiration
-- however re-spelled according to English orthography --, cf.
Pinyin
"ch-" ~ German transcription "tsch-", P. "sh-" ~ GT. "sch-".

  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. It was the "monographic" principle again to
choose "x-" for the English-German "hs-" digraph.

  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; 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`/, i.e. "r" stands for 'the left-
over sound that is retroflex,
therefore has an "r"-like quality'.

Reply