> From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan@reutershealth.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 09:14 AM
>
> Ayers, Mike wrote:
>
> > I also recall when the U.S. government decided to switch from
> > Wade-Giles to Pinyin romanization of Chinese and muscled
> the media into
> > playing along. All that confusion, just so people could
> pronounce the words
> > a little less inaccurately...
>
> Well, Pinyin has the very advantage over WG that you mention: it
> is less likely that distinct names will be confounded. This is not
> true of WG as defined, but is true of WG after it comes out of the
> typesetting hopper with all apostrophes stripped, which happens
> all too often.
Pinyin still has similar problems (Xi'an/Xian), but, yes, they're
less frequent. Nevertheless, W-G had the advantage of presenting words that
were at least pronounceable (albeit pronounced incorrectly) by the average
English speaker, unlike Pinyin, which leaves us to puzzle out how to prounce
"qun" and "xue", while still mispronouncing "cun" and "peng". In my eyes,
it's a tie.
/|/|ike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Wed Oct 03 2001 - 11:15:14 EDT