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Maybe the same reason English road signs omit punctuation.
by emmelaich 2y ago
Maybe the same reason English road signs omit punctuation.
- Terr_ 2y agoNo, those are not the same, because Chinese is a tonal language. [0] Taking Pinyin [1] and erasing the accent-marks creates ambiguity between several different words. The English sign-equivalent would be... Well, something so dumb that nobody does it. Like perhaps deleting the ascenders and descenders of letters dbqp so that they look like oooo, which doesn't even help with horizontal space. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
- poincaredisk 2y agoEnglish equivalent would be writing something like "Aldwych", "Leicester Square" or "River Thames" on a sign, and expecting me, a foreigner, to pronounce it correctly.
- Terr_ 2y agoNo, because without tones it can be ambiguous even for native speakers. If you still don't believe me--or those Wikipedia links I already provided--you test it yourself by finding a native Mandarin speaker. Ask them to decisively determine the meaning and pronunciation of certain Chinese words only from their pinyin with the accents stripped out, such as ma or hua. There's a store with snacks and produce. Do you want to eat lizi, or do you want to eat lizi? (Don't bother squinting, it's the same letters.)
- fennecbutt 2y agoTbf the only reasons these spellings still exist is so that the British can sneer at anybody trying to pronounce them. After moving here A: they weren't that tricky anyway (shire is a given, the only one I had to learn was *eicester) and B: I just get em to pronounce words in Maori.