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I always wondered why Romanization was done the way it was. Someone had the unprecedented opportunity to build a system from whole cloth where everything was pr
by PhasmaFelis 8y ago
I always wondered why Romanization was done the way it was. Someone had the unprecedented opportunity to build a system from whole cloth where everything was pronounced just like it sounded, and completely fucked it up.
- pavlov 8y agoOnly if you expect it to look like English spelling specifically? If the benchmark instead is other European languages, pinyin seems reasonable. The mapping of Q is probably the most unexpected feature.
- geowwy 8y agoThe goal of Pinyin was to be a pronunciation guide for Chinese people who have no preconceived ideas about what letters make what sounds. It works great for that. The problem is when foreigners try to pronounce Pinyin using their existing knowledge of the Latin alphabet. Inevitably they end up pronouncing "Xiaomi" as "Jow-me", etc!
- Zarel 8y agoI think this isn't giving Pinyin enough credit. The biggest problem with English pronunciation, and the biggest reason everyone says English spelling is a mess, is the Great Vowel Shift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift So when you're writing a sound in the Latin alphabet, you have two choices: - spell it like English (the only language with spelling so confusing, spelling bees are a thing) - or spell it like every other language (relatively consistent) Pinyin... chose to be consistent, like every other language. A lot of the other weirdness is based on other languages, too: for instance, "x" is pronounced "sh" is Portuguese as well.
- geowwy 8y agoI'm not saying saying use English vowels or anything like that, I just mean they could have used the letters in more standard ways like MPSII does.
- ajmurmann 8y agoBy what "standard". Many pinyin pronunciations are close to standard for many European languages expect English. On top of that Mandarin has multiple similar sounds (in pinyin presented as "x", "sh", "j" and "q") that would force you to get a little more creative.
- OkGoDoIt 8y agoMy understanding is Pinyin was created to improve literacy rates within China, not as a bridge to western languages.
- chillacy 8y agoI assume the parent is referring to the fact that letters are pronounced differently depending on the context. That said, unless the parent is a native speaker of spanish or esperanto, that doesn't seem like much of a problem. It's at least more consistent than english.
- nitwit005 8y agoIt's impossible to make a system like you're suggesting. When people try to create a "romanized" spelling of the words in their language, they almost always run into the problem of sounds that aren't part of the alphabet. To make it work, you have to do something like add accent marks, or create some special letter combinations.
- schoen 8y agoThere are several different Romanizations of Chinese and each one had different priorities.
- powerapple 8y agoThe problem is that...English does not have all the phonemes from other languages, Romanization will never give you the complete correct pronunciation. As foreigner, you basically lost not only the way to pronounce alien phonemes, also lost the ability to hear it. You will map it to the closet phoneme in your own language, and think they are the same anyway.