12 ms·

It's funny that the objections from both sides have to do with ease of use on computers: - The President wants letters that occur only on a standard keyboard,

It's funny that the objections from both sides have to do with ease of use on computers: - The President wants letters that occur only on a standard keyboard, hence the use of apostrophes to modify the sounds of letters as opposed to accented letters. - Others prefer accented letters because apostrophes would interfere with Google searches and Twitter hashtags.

my_first_acct 9y ago
Desktop keyboards contain apostrophes, but smartphone keyboards generally don't. And one proposal (the best, IMHO) used digraphs rather than accented letters. This would work very nicely with computers, smart phones, Twitter, Google, etc.
- tlholaday 9y ago
  > ... digraphs ... I wonder who to credit for encouraging the English to use th instead of thorn. It turned out ok.
  - gerdesj 9y ago
    True but we now have pretty much the world plus dog thinking that "Ye olde shoppe" sounds very different to "The old shop". Note that I did not put in a real thorn and instead substituted a Y. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)
mc32 9y ago
Yeah, why not use the Slovene alphabet and add some carons to short vowels and be done? The way it's been proposed reminds me of the old Wade-Giles custom of adding apostrophes, breves and other diacritical marks. Pinyin is so much cleaner (except a few umlauts).
- geowwy 9y ago
  Pinyin is cleaner but really misleading if you’re trying to pronounce a word just with your knowledge of other Latin based writing systems. X- is pronounced like sh Q- is pronounced like ch C- is pronounced like ts -iu is pronounced like yo -ian is pronounced like yen etc In this regard even Wade-Giles does a better job in my opinion.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    "Pronounced like" in this context really means "vaguely similar, but actually fundamentally different". There is no English equivalent to the phonemes represented in pinyin by j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r or z. English simply doesn't have alveolo-palatal or retroflex consonants. If anything, I think that pinyin is less misleading than Wade-Giles, because it doesn't lull you into false confidence. I have a weak preference for bopomofo, but that's another argument entirely.
    - mc32 9y ago
      I think you're right about highlighting the quality of the consonants when it comes to official mandarin, but those characteristics fade when it comes to regional variants. Yo be clear, mandarin is of the most concern, just want to raise the issue that while true, it's not uniform throughout the language.
      - jdietrich 9y ago
        It's a fair point, but a pretty niche one - I expect that the overwhelming majority of foreign-language pinyin users are learning standard Mandarin. If you're learning Min or Wu as a second language, you've got bigger problems than the quirks of your transliteration scheme. For native users of pinyin, the consistency with English pronunciation is essentially irrelevant.
        mc32 9y ago
        Sorry, I didn't make myself clear and also for belaboring the point. I wasn't referring to separate dialects, but local non northern mandarin which gets pronounced slightly differently than received pronunciation. A brief example, yes/is, approx [shi], might be pronounced approx [si], etc. But it's mandarin and not hakka, min, etc.
pintxo 9y ago
What is a standard keyboard, anyway? As a native German, I am accustomed to my local „standard“ keyboard. So, no one prevents them from defining a standard keyboard for their new language. And, as someone brought it up, on smartphones your options are basically limmitless, with the option to fully customize the keyboard as it‘s all virtual.
- tom_mellior 9y ago
  > What is a standard keyboard, anyway? One that has exactly the letters that can appear in a passport's machine-readable field. I have lots of funny accented characters in my name, and I have lived in several countries under several different names adjusted to the local officials' keyboards. And don't even get me started on forms saying "your name exactly as in your passport, but also without any funny letters". If there is a realistic chance of writing Kazakh (names) in 7-bit-ASCII-only letters, they should go for it. They could also use two different but equally valid writing systems. Norway has two different official written languages that both sort of correspond to the same spoken language. AFAIR in former Yugoslavia both Latin and Cyrillic were written, I remember a friend telling me that in school they alternated between Latin and Cyrillic weeks.
  - moltar 9y ago
    Yes, in YU they used both. It was localized to member states tho. Croatia used mostly Latin, and Serbs used mostly Cyrillic. They often were able to read and write both non the less.
  - lb1lf 9y ago
    -As for the two written Norwegian languages, they both utilize the same letters and are, by and large, more like two different accents than distinct languages. One (Bokmål) is loosely based on Danish (language of the ruling elite up until 1814), adapted to resemble the way Norwegians for the most part spoke, while the other (Nynorsk) was pretty much based on rural dialects. Nynorsk does make (slightly!) more use of diacritics than bokmål, but most current nynorsk users skip them in daily correspondence; their use is not mandatory. ('too', for instance, being written 'også' in bokmål and 'ôg' in nynorsk.) Also, both versions of Norwegian uses our funny letters æ/Æ (ae, similar-sounding to a in 'bad'), ø/Ø (oe, similar-sounding to ea in 'heard') and å/Å (aa, similar to 'a' in saw). Disclaimer: I am an engineer, not a linguist. There are probably some inaccuracies in the above, but it should get you through the next linguist pub quiz without causing embarrassment.
TeMPOraL 9y ago
It's cheaper to fix Google and Twitter than it is to change keyboards, so I think the President has a stronger point here.

my_first_acct 9y ago

Desktop keyboards contain apostrophes, but smartphone keyboards generally don't. And one proposal (the best, IMHO) used digraphs rather than accented letters. This would work very nicely with computers, smart phones, Twitter, Google, etc.

tlholaday 9y ago
> ... digraphs ... I wonder who to credit for encouraging the English to use th instead of thorn. It turned out ok.
- gerdesj 9y ago
  True but we now have pretty much the world plus dog thinking that "Ye olde shoppe" sounds very different to "The old shop". Note that I did not put in a real thorn and instead substituted a Y. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

mc32 9y ago

Yeah, why not use the Slovene alphabet and add some carons to short vowels and be done? The way it's been proposed reminds me of the old Wade-Giles custom of adding apostrophes, breves and other diacritical marks. Pinyin is so much cleaner (except a few umlauts).

geowwy 9y ago
Pinyin is cleaner but really misleading if you’re trying to pronounce a word just with your knowledge of other Latin based writing systems. X- is pronounced like sh Q- is pronounced like ch C- is pronounced like ts -iu is pronounced like yo -ian is pronounced like yen etc In this regard even Wade-Giles does a better job in my opinion.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  "Pronounced like" in this context really means "vaguely similar, but actually fundamentally different". There is no English equivalent to the phonemes represented in pinyin by j, q, x, zh, ch, sh, r or z. English simply doesn't have alveolo-palatal or retroflex consonants. If anything, I think that pinyin is less misleading than Wade-Giles, because it doesn't lull you into false confidence. I have a weak preference for bopomofo, but that's another argument entirely.
  - mc32 9y ago
    I think you're right about highlighting the quality of the consonants when it comes to official mandarin, but those characteristics fade when it comes to regional variants. Yo be clear, mandarin is of the most concern, just want to raise the issue that while true, it's not uniform throughout the language.
    - jdietrich 9y ago
      It's a fair point, but a pretty niche one - I expect that the overwhelming majority of foreign-language pinyin users are learning standard Mandarin. If you're learning Min or Wu as a second language, you've got bigger problems than the quirks of your transliteration scheme. For native users of pinyin, the consistency with English pronunciation is essentially irrelevant.
      - mc32 9y ago
        Sorry, I didn't make myself clear and also for belaboring the point. I wasn't referring to separate dialects, but local non northern mandarin which gets pronounced slightly differently than received pronunciation. A brief example, yes/is, approx [shi], might be pronounced approx [si], etc. But it's mandarin and not hakka, min, etc.

pintxo 9y ago

What is a standard keyboard, anyway? As a native German, I am accustomed to my local „standard“ keyboard. So, no one prevents them from defining a standard keyboard for their new language. And, as someone brought it up, on smartphones your options are basically limmitless, with the option to fully customize the keyboard as it‘s all virtual.

tom_mellior 9y ago
> What is a standard keyboard, anyway? One that has exactly the letters that can appear in a passport's machine-readable field. I have lots of funny accented characters in my name, and I have lived in several countries under several different names adjusted to the local officials' keyboards. And don't even get me started on forms saying "your name exactly as in your passport, but also without any funny letters". If there is a realistic chance of writing Kazakh (names) in 7-bit-ASCII-only letters, they should go for it. They could also use two different but equally valid writing systems. Norway has two different official written languages that both sort of correspond to the same spoken language. AFAIR in former Yugoslavia both Latin and Cyrillic were written, I remember a friend telling me that in school they alternated between Latin and Cyrillic weeks.
- moltar 9y ago
  Yes, in YU they used both. It was localized to member states tho. Croatia used mostly Latin, and Serbs used mostly Cyrillic. They often were able to read and write both non the less.
- lb1lf 9y ago
  -As for the two written Norwegian languages, they both utilize the same letters and are, by and large, more like two different accents than distinct languages. One (Bokmål) is loosely based on Danish (language of the ruling elite up until 1814), adapted to resemble the way Norwegians for the most part spoke, while the other (Nynorsk) was pretty much based on rural dialects. Nynorsk does make (slightly!) more use of diacritics than bokmål, but most current nynorsk users skip them in daily correspondence; their use is not mandatory. ('too', for instance, being written 'også' in bokmål and 'ôg' in nynorsk.) Also, both versions of Norwegian uses our funny letters æ/Æ (ae, similar-sounding to a in 'bad'), ø/Ø (oe, similar-sounding to ea in 'heard') and å/Å (aa, similar to 'a' in saw). Disclaimer: I am an engineer, not a linguist. There are probably some inaccuracies in the above, but it should get you through the next linguist pub quiz without causing embarrassment.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

It's cheaper to fix Google and Twitter than it is to change keyboards, so I think the President has a stronger point here.