Executive Summary: nothing new in this post by Dan. He rumbles thru some
technical stuff that he thinks he still remembers. He makes the
usual swipes at “Dr. Yu”. Skip.
quote:
How about using xi, qi and ji in place of si, chhi and chi (and their
combinations with other finals?) This would be untraditional for a
Taiwanese romanization, but would there be any other negative aspect?
It might be a bit unwieldy in the case of some dialect differences,
but after all do chu and chi really share the same initial sound?
That would be the way to go, but then you'll get into a debate as to
if Taiwanese really has a jqx before i or is it just zcs. Seems to me
there are lots of allophones... by the way they hold press conferences
against x ("tourists can't cope"), but apparently c is no big deal.
quote:
This principle is unneccessary in my mind. Yes there should be maximum
commonality for ease of learning, but it shouldn't be enshrined as a
principle, most basically because many sounds between the two
languages are similar but not exactly similar. It's wrong to give the
user the impression that they are.
(the tongyong idea is one sound one symbol, else the kids will get
confused ("increasing their burden") ... but wait, why is it ok to
leave cao alone but change qing to cing)
Anyway, like I say, Dr. Yu is nuts and so are his language expert
buddies who since 2000 line the ranks of the mandarin board
www.edu.tw/mandr
Am I the only foreigner who has ever made contact with them? Why
can’t some other foreigners kindly see what’s up with them? I mean
who knows, I might be the one who it nuts all along. Can somebody do
me a favor and tell me if I’m nuts? I mean if I’m nuts then that’s
bad for business. Gotta know. All’s you got to do is pop over to the
Dept. of Ethnology at Academia Sinica, bus 212, ask for Yu Boquan.
Sigh as you mention “that guy who doesn’t love Taiwan, Dan
Jerk*ffson”.
Where was I? Oh, Indeed, then there would be need to “fix” hanyu
pinyin, and the hotheads could just do their thing to Taiwanese and
leave us alone.
Anyway, your mission Jim, if you decide to accept it, is to make a one
size fits all pinyin system, because if the school kids ever see a
symbol that is supposed to be read one way here, and another way
there, their burden will supposedly be increased. (can’t Chinese
chars. be read both ways though?) You will see that indeed hanyu
pinyin is customized for mandarin, just like the tongyong dudes say.
You will see that if you just tinkered a little there, you can come up
with a one size fits all system… (huh, that simple?) but you will
look back and see that you made a mess of hanyu pinyin, and just like
“I revised the decimal system!” you probably wouldn’t have much heart
to foist it upon world the community… (or go even further like Yu Boquan,
who now spells his name Yu BoCyuan I suppose, and screw up some
initials (sheng1mu3) just for vengeance.)
Anyway, if you, like me, aren’t willing to mess up mandarin, and
instead just go with the world standard, than all that’s left is doing
Taiwanese and hakka…
quote:
what can be done for zhuyin surely can be done for a romanization?
well let's take mandarin shi xi and si, and Taiwanese si. Well, in
zhuyin I can write these all no sweat, the latter being
ㄙㄧ (unless my unicode attempt messes up).
Noting that if we resort to "ii" it is much more customary to make
Mandarin's si rewritten sii than to do that with Taiwanese. Indeed,
In Dongshi Hakka, I need si, sii, xi all at once. Well, we said that
si xi bi di gi ji all rhyme, while sii rhymes with mandarin si. In
our [Me and Luo Zhaojin, a rare non-nut on the mandarin board] vision,
this can co-exist with a non ruined hanyu pinyin, all we have to do is
tell the user: "sorry, yes, there's some incompatibilities".
By non ruined hanyu pinyin, I mean for me if any of you so far as lay
a finger on anything more than say forgetting to put the two dots on
u, then you have destroyed 50% of the value of hanyu pinyin for me.
For me “correct sounds”, “proper phonetics”, “bad for tourists”,
etc. issues are much less important giant user base: my guarantee that
the stuff will be around. If you aren’t clear just which is
important, please look at English, business is booming even though
“the burden on the kids” must be phenomenal with all those
spelling irregularities. “The Kids must be going out of their minds”
when faced with English and Spanish at once. Of course “we must make
a new system” oh, and “we must throw some monkey wrenches into spanish
just to be fair as we redo english, as we are too jealous of spanish’s
regularities”.
Anyway, I bet I am wasting so many keystrokes talking about Yu… he
would go away faster if I didn’t pay any attention to him instead.
In a free market his sh*t would be nowhere…
Oops, as I was saying…
But without that principle the whole supposed need for Tongyong
crumbles: the sales pitch was “one cannot just add extensions to hanyu
pinyin to cover Taiwanese, Hakka, without confusing the school kids,
therefore we need to start afresh for all three; a new unified system”
Actually right off the bat different uses of i in hanyu pinyin (shi,
si, xi) would disqualify it from the school room even for Mandarin,
where only Tongyong is fit to save the day, they say. So, how does he
save the day? qing is bad, so use cing (jing is still intact, it
turns out he put that back in). Who cares if you sound like a
“poofter” as they say on Monty Python. Oh, ci becomes cii, which is
the key you will need by the way, to not mess up Taiwanese…
quote:
Those are quite some quotes. Are those word-for-word?
Yes, also TaiDa professor and mandarin board member Jiang Wenyu
江雯瑜 (hope that renders correctly) says
hanyu pinyin's Q will overwork your left pinky, whilst I would be more
concerned about the ENTER key and one's right pinky.
[url=http://jidanni.org/lang/pinyin/images/evil_white_shirt.jpg]http://oriented.org/lang/pinyin/images/evil_white_shirt.jpg[/url]
quote:
My idea is only to ensure maximum commonality between the two systems
while sacrificing 0% consistency. If a few corners of Hanyu Pinyin had
to be tucked in here or there, I wouldn't object. Personally I
wouldn't object if they thought up a whole new system, as long as it
was as good of a system as Hanyu Pinyin.
My experience is if you make changes, you should make more not less,
otherwise you will look so much like the well known standard that
people won't realize it until something breaks... "hey, you sold me
imitation pinyin!, made in Taiwan, g*ddam*it, I want the real thing,
no tampering beneath the shrink wrap!"
Hmmm, anyway, I don’t think you want the NT$1000, backward globe and
all, http://jidanni.org/geo/nt1000/
I mean if you are going to revise hanyu pinyin then you should justify
with linguistic reasons, not political, why for the same language,
Taiwan should spell it differently than China… whereas Jamaica can
spell English it the same as the US even though it sounds so
different.
Also how about a long term view: 100 years from now sounds will drift
anyways… bla bla.
As far as politics, I wish they would grow up and see that skin color
or what language you speak or even how you jeez, spell it, don’t mean
it is not in your interest that taiwan not be ruled by china
duh… snore.
lots of articles here:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=jidanni&hl=zh-TW&scoring=d&selm=3 CE22CDA.A3E132C7%40mx.nthu.edu.tw&rnum=1
seems if I want to cultivate an aloof image i shouldnt type so much
about losing subjects. Anyway, is mayor Ma really cleaning up the
mess like he is supposed to? i can’t tell because i only go to taibei
for special occasions.