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From: deb5@midway.uchicago.edu (Daniel von Brighoff)
Subject: Re: Pinyin
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References: <32C892DC.1BDD@scruznet.com> <7fsp4j37l0.fsf@phoenix.cs.hku.hk> <E3G88A.5EI@midway.uchicago.edu> <7fybe9ur4n.fsf@phoenix.cs.hku.hk>
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 20:00:53 GMT
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In article <7fybe9ur4n.fsf@phoenix.cs.hku.hk>,
Lee Sau Dan ~{@nJX6X~} <sdlee@cs.hku.hk> wrote:
>>>>>> "Daniel" == Daniel von Brighoff <deb5@midway.uchicago.edu> writes:
>
>    Daniel> 	How many English-speakers could make heads or tails of
>    Daniel> even the simplest Chinese character?  For New Year's, some
>    Daniel> acquaintances gave me a packet of Manchu coins with four
>    Daniel> large characters on it.  They told me these said "Gonghei
>    Daniel> faatchoi" when they actually read "Da4li3 da4ji3"!  And
>    Daniel> "da4" is one of the first characters anyone learns.

[Oops!  Make that "da4li4 da4ji2".  Boy, do I need help on my tones!]

>That's  impossible.    In "gongheifaatchoi",   there  are no  repeated
>syllables at  all.  On these 4 coins,  2 characters are repeated.  One
>needn't know  any Chinese characters  to make  a confident  guess that
>those characters on the 4 coins are not "gongheifaatchoi".

	On the contrary, it just goes to show that they never looked at
them.  The man who sold them the packets claimed the characters read
"Happy New Year".  From past experience, they knew that Chinese for "Happy
New Year" was "Gonghei faatchoi".  Despite years of attending Chinese New
Year, they had never taken any notice of how this greeting is written.

>    Daniel> 	This never made sense to me.  If you can use your
>    Daniel> software to place Chinese and Latin characters side by
>    Daniel> side on a few pages, why can't you do it on all of them?
>
>Perhaps, they think  that   the characters "contaminate" the   running
>text, in the same way that I  think English words appearing in running
>Chinese texts is contamination.

	Perhaps.  Personally, I find it more of a bother to page to the
back everytime I want to see the characters for a term than to "bleep"
right over them when I don't care, but maybe I'm an exception.

>BTW, I  found many technical of the  "older"  style that you mentioned
>with   the   Chinese   characters     hand-written.   Hasn't  printing
>technologies improved?   Why can't people  inserted printed characters
>into running   text, while  people   in the  old  days  could inserted
>hand-written ones?

	As I said, they can but just don't bother.  Also, handwritten
characters seem most common in a certain era, after the demise of movable
type and before the advent of modern computer technology.  In the movable
type days, creating a new piece of type for a handwritten character was a
monumental pain; if you didn't have pre-cast type, you didn't bother.
Nowadays, creating a new true-type font is as easy as justifying the
margins.  In between, anything that could be photographed could also be
printed, so if you had the patience to handwrite the characters on every
page of your manuscript, it was possible to include them in the final
work.
>
>    >> How are the Japanese and Korean solving this problem?
>
>    Daniel> 	Inserting English into their texts?  There are
>    Daniel> standardised systems for transliterating English into
>    Daniel> katakana and hankul, respectively.  They have some odd
>    Daniel> points (see below), but are about as accurate as practical
>    Daniel> given how different their phonological systems are from
>    Daniel> English.
>
>Yes,   the  transliterations  can   turn   the   English  words   into
>Japanese/Korean spellings  which   are pronounced close  to  (and only
>close to) the English sounds.  However, because the syllable structure
>of both  Japanese and  Korean  (and many SE  Asian  languages) is much
>simpler than that of English (and many  other European languages), the
>transliterations cannot   be  perfect.  The  problem  deterioates when
>there are clusters of  consonants,  such as   the "spr"  in  "spring".
>(Japanese  "gudamoningu" for "Good Morning" is  one of  the worst that
>I've heard of.)

Worse than 'suturaiku'?

>BTW, why don't   we invent a    transliteration scheme for  Roman  -->
>Chinese  characters?   We can establish  a one-one  mapping from Roman
>letters  to a  small set of  Chinese characters.   Then, we can easily
>transliterate   in  both   directions, and  this     would  be dialect
>independent.  You don't  have to scratch your head  to think about the
>relation  between "Sherlock Holmes"  and  "Fuermosi"  (PY) [ This  was
>phonetically   translated   according to  the   dialects  of Fujian, I
>believe. ], or  "Hebrew" and "Xibolai" [ I  think this is phonetically
>translated word, according to Southern dialects such as Cantonese. ]

	This already seems to be the case.  Many of the characters so
common to transliterations (e.g. ni2, ya4) hardly seem to show up
elsewhere.  All that need be done would be to bring older transliterations
or those transmitted from non-Mandarin dialects into line according to the
standard system.  This was done in Korean, for instance, where
transliterations were originally done by means of Sino-Korean characters.
Although a few relics survive (especially in place names), most have been
replaced with standard hankul transliterations.  Even names written with
characters are now more often transliterared--e.g. <pieythunam> instead of
<wel.nam> "Vietnam" or <hongkhong> instead of <hyanghang> "Hong Kong".
-- 
	 Daniel "Da" von Brighoff    /\          Dilettanten
	(deb5@midway.uchicago.edu)  /__\         erhebt Euch
				   /____\      gegen die Kunst!
