Newsgroups: sci.lang
Date: Thu, 26 Dec 1996 17:36:47 -0800
From: Brian Chang <polyglot@california.com>
Subject: Re: Mao's Aphabet
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Dont YOU rant against my political opinion, commie-defender!
Mao IS dung!
My article is 98% about Language, why are so upset about me
badmouthing comunism?
If you don't care about politics, poltics WILL care about you anyway.
You are as politically partisan as I am, but are denying it.
Won't bother answering the rest of your nosense.On 23
Dec
1996, Mark Rosenfelder wrote:

> Date: 23 Dec 1996 19:10:12 GMT
> From: Mark Rosenfelder <markrose@spss.com>
> Newsgroups: sci.lang
> Subject: Re: Mao's Aphabet
> 
> In article <Pine.BSI.3.95.961213215027.7312D-100000@global.california.com>,
> Brian Chang  <polyglot@california.com> wrote:
> >A number of non-Chinese, as well as most non-Mainland Chinese,
> >have trouble believing that somebody in his right mind would
> >invent such a cumbersome, inadequate and illogical system as the
> >Mainland Romanization.  (Only MS-DOS can probably compete with it 
> >in user-unfriendliness and ineptness.)  Many Mainlanders also 
> >wonder about the origin of this out-of-place system which they
> >were forced to learn by their government, and why it was needed 
> >in the first place.  Actually, it started as a means of 
> >communication between two communist governments.  Now that you
> >know the answer, do you expect it to function better than a Yugo car
> >or a Long March rocket? 
> 
> Political rants are really inappropriate in sci.lang; if you don't like
> pinyin, give linguistic reasons.  The merits of a romanization have nothing
> to do with the demerits of Mao.  And the mere piling on of adjectives 
> ("cumbersome, inadequate and illogical") proves nothing, but only expresses 
> emotion.
> 
> Pinyin is a much better romanization than Wade-Giles-- more rational, more
> compact, *less* cumbersome, and better suited to use by the mass media--
> and education in Chinese.
> 
> The chief problem in romanizing (Mandarin) Chinese comes from the stops:
> the Roman alphabet was devised for languages that distinguish voiced from
> unvoiced stops, while Mandarin distinguishes aspirated and unaspirated.
> No romanization can really suggest the correct sounds to the average 
> English speaker, who will pronounce Wade-Giles p as [ph] and have no idea 
> what to do with p'.  Writing p and ph would not be any better-- a 
> Westerner would pronounce ph as [f].
> 
> The apostrophe for aspiration was really a terrible idea.  It's really a
> stopgap diacritic, used for so many things across different romanizations
> (aspiration, glottalization, palatalization, a glottal stop, omitted sounds)
> that it means nothing at all except to experts.  And non-scholarly media
> regularly omit it, making it impossible for anyone who does know Chinese
> to know how to pronounce any Chinese name reported in the news.  I still
> have trouble remembering how to pronounce "Tai-pei"-- which consonants are
> missing their apostrophes?  (It's T'ai-pei if I recall correctly.  It's
> a lot easier to remember Taibei.)
> 
> Pinyin solves the problem with admirable clearheadedness: Mandarin has
> two sets of stops; the Roman alphabet has two sets of letters for stops;
> it uses the one to represent the other.  P and b to represent [p] and
> [ph] are more visually salient (thus easier to read and remember) than
> any other alternative; no more misleading (since the Westerner has to
> learn what *any* system means); and impossible for the media to screw up.
> 
> It's also well to remember that pinyin is used in teaching the Chinese
> themselves.  Why should China burden itself with a romanization designed
> primarily to help English speakers (and which doesn't even do that very well)?
> 
> The elimination of unnecessary hyphens, and the use of diacritics for tones,
> also make pinyin more compact, with less graphic clutter.  And the shape of
> the diacritics is a much greater help to the beginner than WG's numbers.
> 
> The one weakness of pinyin is in the vowels-- I still haven't figured out
> the logic behind some of the representations.  I've always half-suspected
> that "-ung" is written "-ong" to avoid having "dung" in the middle of Mao's
> given name.
> 
> >Being a comparative linguist, I have never heard of another 
> >language where the sound like "j" (like in JOB) is represented by 
> >the Latin letters ZH, 
> 
> But once you've used the Roman alphabet's voiced stops for Mandarin's
> unaspirated ones, this is only reasonable.  s : z :: sh : zh.
> 
> And as you know, /zh/ is *like* English j, but it isn't j-- it's not voiced.
> Again, why saddle Chinese children and students of Chinese with a system
> designed for English speakers (who will get it wrong anyway)?
> 
> >nor "ch" (like in CHAIN) represented by Q, etc.  
> 
> No harder to get used to than the use of q for a uvular stop or a velar
> fricative, as in Quechua, or for a glottal stop, as in some romanizations
> used in Chinese dialectology.  And though some quarrel with distinguishing
> ch/q from zh/j, it does remind the foreign learner (e.g. me) to pronounce
> them differently.
> 
> >Question:  What is the purpose of writing "Xiaoping" if to most 
> >lay readers this spelling provides no guidance as to how to 
> >pronounce it -- or just misleads them?
> 
> You really think that "Hsiao-p'ing" is better?  An English speaker who
> knows no Chinese can do nothing with either spelling.
> 
> >Now, Russian does not use Latin but Cyrillic, a
> >modified form of the Greek alphabet, and therefore Borodin wasn't 
> >really averse to reading X as "sh", 
> 
> X in Cyrillic represents a velar fricative, kh-- if the devisers of pinyin
> were influenced by Cyrillic they should have used it for /h/.  Using x for a
> sh-like sound has good precedent in Portuguese, early Spanish, and Vietnamese.
> 
> >A few years ago in Los Angeles, during the political 
> >asylum trial of my friend who spells his family name as Zhang, his
> >American lawyer kept calling him "Mr. Zine".  Nobody in the court 
> >could figure out why this made me giggle involuntarily.  During 
> >the break, I (in my capacity as a witness) tried to explain to her
> >that she should read it as "Jong".  "But," she answered, "it is 
> >clearly written "Zine"!"  
> 
> I can't fathom how someone could read "Zhang" as "zine", but that should
> only reinforce the idea that naive speakers can mess up any romanization
> scheme.  Zhang should suggest the (incorrect) pronunciation [ZejN] to most 
> English speakers.  The obvious alternative, Chang, is not much better,
> suggesting [tSejN].  Your suggestion of Jong, suggesting [dZON], is not bad, 
> and recognizes the good sense of pinyin's use of the 'voiced' letters in the 
> Roman alphabet for unvoiced, unaspirated sounds.  
> 
> But "Jong" wouldn't work for non-English speakers-- to a Frenchman it would
> suggest [ZoN], to a Latin American [hon].  Perhaps the chief advantage of
> pinyin is its use around the world, a great boon for scholars.  It's a lot
> easier if everybody has to deal with 'Zhang' rather than sometimes Chang,
> sometimes Jong, sometimes Tchang, sometimes Tschang, etc.
> 
> 

