From: mikel@Apple.COM (Mikel Evins)
Newsgroups: rec.martial-arts
Subject: Re: pinyin
Date: 8 Jan 93 19:04:47 GMT
Organization: Apple Computer Inc, Cupertino, CA

In article <1993Jan8.084010.24802@sei.cmu.edu> psc@sei.cmu.edu (Peter Capell) writes:
>08-Jan-93 02:13	mikel@Apple.COM (Mikel Evins)	Re: Well, well, well...
>
>But then again, considering your statement, how can it be true?  There is
>no "q" or "x" in mandarin, so how can native speakers have a sound associated
>with english letters?

Most of the sounds in Mandarin have no exact English equivalent. Offhand,
I can think of a few that are pretty close to the same, or identical.
For example, if you pronounce 'b', 'd', 'f', or 'm' the way you
would in English then you'll be about right (at least at the beginning of 
a syllable). On the other hand, the Mandarin sounds written as 'c',
'ch', 'e', 'h', 'j', and 'k' have no exact English equivalent. The
designers of Pinyin chose a mapping into the Roman alphabet that 
provided a mapping with minimum ambiguity about what sound was
intended, but which also provided some correspondence with Western
usage. Overall, the scheme is not arbitrary, but there are a couple
of choices, notably 'q' and 'x' that are essentially arbitrary.

>>The letters are chosen to correspond to sounds used in Mandarin, not sounds
>>used in English.
>
>It seems you may be talking about the same phenomenon as I am with respect
>Persian.  And if this is so, then I must reiterate that while there is no
>perfect mapping of our letters to Chinese phonemes, the letters used are
>completely out of line.

I don't think it's completely out of line. Running the Roman alphabet
through my mind, the only assignments I can think of that bear no
resemblance to any Western-language use of the letter are 'e', 'q',
and 'x'. The others all have plausible counterparts in one Western
language or another, and you could even make a case for 'e', which
sounds something like a Western 'schwa' sound, but there is no Roman
letter for that sound (it is usually represented in phonetic notation
as an upside-down 'e', so you can make a case that the Pinyin spelling
is appropriate).

The situation with 'q' and 'x' is that there are two Mandarin sounds that
could plausibly be spelled 'ch', and two that could be spelled 'sh'. The
choice the Pinyin designers made was to assign 'ch' to one of the
'ch' sounds, and 'q' (which wasn't needed for anything else) to the
other. Similarly, they assigned 'sh' to one of the 'sh' sounds, and
'x' to the other. They even arguably assigned 'ch' and 'sh' to
the correct ones of the pairs: those sounds are not exactly like
the sounds spelled that way in English, but are fairly close, but
followed by an aspiration (an 'h' sound).

>My point is that one *never* learns a language exclusively by reading it.  So
>what's the point of creating a level of indirection that has absolutely no
>intuitive mapping to normal english phonemes.

You are quite right that there is no way to learn to pronounce a
language just by reading it. But think of it this way: if you
want to use an alphabet to write a language you have a choice to invent 
one or to use one that is already in use. There are advantages to
using one already in use: you don't have to try to design a new
one, and you can provide some help to people learning the language
by matching the alphabet's letters to the sounds of the language
based upon analogs in languages already written with the alphabet
(as I noted above, this is the case for all but two or three of
the letters used in Pinyin). 

Keep in mind that the same thing was done for English, 
but in a more haphazard manner, which is
one of the reasons that English spelling is so difficult
compared to other European languages. The Roman alphabet was
designed for Latin. 

It's not that there is absolutely no intuitive mapping of Pinyin to 
english (and other Western languages); it is that a few of the
letters are not intuitive (and, of course, the conclusions that
intuition would give an English-speaker about the rest of the letters
are mostly wrong, but not seriously wrong. That's the way it is
for reading any language you don't read and speak).