Re: Mua5huan5 gah bbeh4 si2 (was: Blue grass and skies)

On Thu, Aug 10, 2000 at 01:29:52PM -0700, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
> From: "H. S. Teoh"
[snip]
> > Hmm.... I always find it rather awkward that orthographic systems for
> > Chinese dialects tend to render unvoiced consonants with a letter that's
> > voiced in English. In Hokkien, the velar in "gim1" (I prefer "kim") is
> > _unvoiced_. Well, even if some variants of Hokkien (Taiwanese perhaps?)
> > actually voice it, it's not as strongly voiced as the English "g", AFAIK.
>
> It's a trade-off really. It may be phonetically inaccurate (though it gets
> English speakers at least close), but the voiced letters are there for the
> using, and if you don't use them, then you have to come up with a scheme
> like k, k', t, t' à la Wade-Giles (which leads to weird, though not
> insurmountable, examples for the average English speaker like "pronounce Tao
> 'Dow'") or like k, kh, t, th à la someone else.
Well, this may be totally off the wall, but when I write email to my
relatives, sometimes I tend to "anglicize" Hokkien phrases -- a totally
inconsistent romanization, but, knowing the way they pronounce English
(which isn't exactly good English), I can exploit that and write something
they can actually understand.

Oh, BTW... exactly which tones correspond with which number?? I'm getting
really confused here, because I pronounce Mua5huan5 with *different* tones
for each syllable... might be because the Hokkien I speak has mutated its
tones through assimilation of various local dialects. (I *do* know that
the type of Hokkien people speak in my hometown is pronounced with
different tones than either Taiwanese or mainland Hokkien. Very giguai :-)


T