Re: What is an alphabet? Re: Optimum number of symbols
| From: | Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, May 30, 2002, 12:27 |
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Hello,
Yitzik wrote:
> There is a standard cyrillization of Mandarine developed IIRC
> by a Russian
> (Soviet) linguist Y.Polivanov in 1930's. It works quite well.
> It uses no
> diacritics except for tones, but makes it quite easy to
> decode the actual
> pronounciation in spite of non-traditional use of some
> letters: Cyr-O stands
> for both [o] and [uo], Cyr-YU = [iou], and [y] is spelt Cyr-YU +
> Cyr-IKRATKOE.
>
> Pavel, any comments?
Looks OK to me. (only the last example spells Pinyin _yu_).
Save that to the best of my knowledge it wasn't Polivanov who invented
it.
Oh, and an interesting feaure is that _hui_ is in different names spelt
variously as 'xoj' or 'xuej'! :-))))))))
Pavel
--
Pavel Iosad pavel_iosad@mail.ru
'I am a philologist, and thus a misunderstood man'
--JRR Tolkien, _The Notion Club Papers_
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