> From: Philipp Reichmuth [mailto:uzsv2k@uni-bonn.de]
> On a side note of course it would by now probably make sense
> to add "Latin" as alphabet to Chinese as well since hanyu pinyin has
> been adopted as some sort of official latinization system by the
> Chinese government, but that's an entirely different matter.
As I understand it, the chief reason that the PRC declared a
standard for romanization was so that they could at least look at two
transcriptions of Chinese words and know if they were the same.
However, I have learned that there have at least been experiments in
the PRC with teaching the pinyin to children. The young man with whom I
spoke told me that they had taught him pinyin in the first grade[1], but
began teaching hanzi in the second grade without using pinyin (pinyin was
never used again).
In any event, it is incorrect to use pinyin to write Chinese if
hanzi are available, so I do not think that it would be correct to list
Latin as an alphabet for Chinese, as it would be incorrect to list any
alphabet for any language when that alphabet is only used by the illiterate
(in that language) or those unable to write properly.
> Maybe one could introduce another abbreviation such as
> "[4] = In use only for transliteration of the language"
> and thus add the transliteration scripts for the languages? For
> languages such as Arabic or Chinese where the Latin and Cyrillic (only
> for arabic) transliterations enjoy rather extensive use in the
> linguist community, it would allow them to see if they can write their
> transcribed academic work using unicode as well.
>
> We'd then have, for example:
> Chinese - Han, Latin[4]
> Arabic - Arabic, Latin[4], Cyrillic[4]
This at least would be more accurate, but I do not think that it
would be worth the effort for a few reasons:
1) This list is mainly so that people who are not familiar with a
language can determine if they have the fonts to view a language. Throwing
in the extra scripts is more likely to confuse people than enlighten them.
2) The scripts for transliterating languages tend to be sensitive
to who's doing the transliteration.
3) It would take a good deal of effort to keep up on which scripts
are being used to discuss which language.
4) The folks doing the transliteration are likely to already know
what scripts to use. If they don't, I suspect that they'd check with
whomever they intend to exchange, not the Unicode website.
Also, I see that the script for Chinese is listed as "Han", not
"Chinese". Must we insist on confusing people?
/|/|ike
[1] - I never pinned down his age at the time of these events, so the
references to "grades" are simply approximate comparisons to the American
educational system.
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