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When I was taught Pinyin, the instructor explained that the phonetics were influenced by the Russian pronunciation of the roman alphabet. Not sure if this is tr
by achou 10y ago
When I was taught Pinyin, the instructor explained that the phonetics were influenced by the Russian pronunciation of the roman alphabet. Not sure if this is true, or if it explains the issues you're describing. But it seemed plausible that China thought they were going to be closer to the USSR given the shared ideology in the 50's.
In any case, as a person who has a decent pronunciation in Chinese but lacking the ability to fully read/write, Pinyin has been absolutely great for being able to type Chinese informally. I can communicate almost anything I can say, and that's truly wonderful. Part of that is the smart prediction software. But Pinyin has a big part in it too: it's not difficult at all to sound out a word and figure out how to spell it in Pinyin. That's the essential feature that Chinese characters lack, and Pinyin nails that essential quality as far as I can tell.
- uranusjr 10y agoI know very little Russian and can’t say for certain, but I think Russian is similar to English in these consonants. I should make it clear I don’t think Pinyin is a bad system, only that it does not map sounds to European languages well. And that is fine, as least for its original purpose. Contrary to common belief, Pinyin was not developed to better educate illiterate people (this does not even make sense if you think carefully), but as the next step after letter simplification (what we know as Simplified Chinese today) towards Chinese Romanisation. The goal was not to represent sounds of Chinese characters, but to outright replace them. The actual reason behind using (for example) b and p instead of p and p' is exactly this—they are optimising for ease to write, not sound accuracy. And in regard to making it easy for people not prolific with Chinese letters to read, be them foreigners or simply illiterate, a phonetic transcription system is indeed important. But although having a standard phonetic transcription is key to the jump in literacy in China, I would argue the same can be achieved with any decent system, and a few of them are already around by the time they started working on Pinyin. All in all, while Pinyin is good for its original purpose, it achieved its current status not because of academical reasons, but political ones. The Chinese Communists government had always have a habit ignoring existing systems and inventing their own. :p
- hetman 10y agoDefinitely not. Russian has no aspirated consonants at all, nor would they pronounce them in the Latin alphabet. In fact a Russian would pronounce the roman "T" exactly the same way a Mandarin speaker would pronounce the pinyin "D" so I don't think there's much credence to your instructor's story.
- singhblom 10y agoThere was Russian influence, but maybe not for all the letters. Pinyin 'q' is based on Russian 'ч' if I recall correctly.