Some observations on Mandarin...

Especially for anyone who knows something about Mandarin and/or Chinese
linguistics, please feel free to critique...

The other night I made a spreadsheet and filled in a chart of
consonant-rime syllable groups in Mandarin (from zhongwen.com); the
rimes of course are the vowel + nasal when applicable groups.  (I've
been working, off and on, on a reformed Pinyin; I was going to merge ch
> q, sh > x, zh > j; I might not since it is very necessary to
distinguish retroflexes from palatals as clearly as possible.)

About the retroflexes.  Since the retroflex consonants are ch, sh, zh
and r, and the palatal consonants are q, x, j and y, I came to the
discovery that r and y could be related closer than I imagined!

Of course we know that y means the palatal semivowel (or maybe, more
emphatically, a voiced palatal fricative), and r is a retroflex
approximant (or maybe a fricative -- anybody know?).  And both
labiovelar w and labiopalatal semivocalic ü can be found.

So that gave me a better handle on consonant "umlaut" in Tech: as there
is a "soft" and "hard" /w/ (IPA inverted h vs. IPA w), there should be
a "soft" and "hard" /j/ (IPA j vs. IPA inverted r with retroflex
tail?).  So the name Ja'aqob would be pronounced something like
"Ra'akov"!

Anyway, I'm really having fun with this.  And praise God, we finally
got some rain this weekend!!

DaW.

(Stay tuned for: if you breed a sitar with a banjo, what do you get?)

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