Newsgroups: sci.lang
From: Kitt@cary.demon.co.uk (Kittredge Cowlishaw)
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!news.duke.edu!news-feed-1.peachnet.edu!gatech!howland.reston.ans.net!news.sprintlink.net!demon!cary.demon.co.uk!Kitt
Subject: Chinese romanization systems (was H and digraphs thereof)
References: <37t514$fq7@grivel.une.edu.au) <CxtB2r.6C6@inter.NL.net) <37uqhc$f2n@gordon.enea.se>
Organization: The Old School House
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Date: Sat, 29 Oct 1994 09:49:14 +0000
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sommar@enea.se "Erland Sommarskog" writes:
> Miguel Carrasquer (mcv@inter.NL.net) writes:
> )Julie Vaux <jvaux@metz.une.edu.au) wrote:
> ))      Nh - the elegant viet solution to writing the voiced palatal nasal.
> )Using "h" to mark palatalization (nh, lh, ch, sh) is of course extremely
> )illogical.  Albanian uses "xh" to mark the "dzh" sound (j/g in English).
> And in Galician "nh" stands for a velar nasal if I understand things
> correctly.

The silliest use of 'nh' in the world is surely in Gwoyeu Romatzyh,
(a system of tonal spelling for Mandarin Chinese) where the 'h'
after {m, n, l, r} is used to indicate first tone.  In other syllables,
first tone is unmarked, but for syllables beginning with nasals and
liquids, second tone is unmarked and first tone is marked by an 'h'
after the initial consonant.

The reasoning behind this is that syllables beginning with nasals
and liquids more commonly occur with second tone than with first
tone, so the uncluttered spelling (i.e. without extra unpronounced
letters to indicate the tone) was chosen for the most frequent case.

For most students of (Mandarin) Chinese, however, the relative
frequency of tones among syllables is of little interest, and the
resulting inconsistency of the tonal spelling rules is, for many,
at best an inconvenience and at worst a source of confusion and
frustration.

For the record, Romatzyh is my favourite system of romanization.
Pinyin is horrible--the tone marks are usually omitted, and even
when they're not omitted, half the time they're wrong--and I much
prefer to use Romatzyh for myself, but I've given up trying to
defend it to others.

--Kittredge
