Romanized Chinese (was Simplicity of English)

[Mark A. Mandel]

Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET> writes:

>>>>>
Obviously one doesn't speak in ideograms. Anything one can understand over
the telephone in Chinese he can read in Romanized Chinese.
<<<<<

I'm not so sure. Writing does not capture all the information available in
speech, especially prosody. Punctuation is an attempt to get some of it,
but really captures very little. This may be even more true in
orthographies like Chinese that do not separate words. And prosody may
provide much of the disambiguation between sentences that are
segment-for-segment homophonous or nearly so.

And, as Peter McGraw said,

>>>>>
Furthermore, inexplicably Pinyin itself
normally doesn't use the diacritics that indicate the tones, so if you ask
a Chinese to fill in the tones in a name transcribed in Pinyin, they will
normally be helpless unless you can also provide the characters.
<<<<<

Right. This can be done either with diacritical marks or with appended
numerals, e.g., tai4ji1quan1 'Tai Chi Ch'uan' [using the more familiar
romanization (Wade-Giles? Yale?) for the English form of the name]. But
they're often omitted, and I can tell you at least one reason.

Have you ever taught phonology of American English (or substitute your own
language) to other native speakers? Phonological analysis of one's own
tongue is a learned ability, very different from native competence and not
at all easy for most people. In my experience as senior linguist at Dragon
Systems, many "native speakers" of Mandarin (pu3tong1hua4) can't give the
tones of a word, and often misspell it even in untoned pin1yin1. The
Mandarin dialects cover a very broad geographic range, with a lot of
diversity in tone systems and in segmentals, and many speakers do not make
the standard three-way distinction of alveolar, retroflex, and palatal
consonants (c z s / ch zh sh / q j x) and therefore cannot reliably spell
words containing them in pin1yin1. (I have learned that if I want a
standard Mandarin pronunciation of a word I have to ask our Mandarin
language specialist or one of the vocabulary developers rather than just
any random in-house Mandarin speaker. Let's not even consider Chinese L2
speakers of Mandarin, i.e., those whose native Chinese belongs to another
dialect group such as Wu or Min.)


   Mark A. Mandel : Dragon Systems, a Lernout & Hauspie company
          Mark_Mandel at dragonsys.com : Senior Linguist
 320 Nevada St., Newton, MA 02460, USA : http://www.dragonsys.com