Pinyin, why?

[Anatoli]

Thank you for your answers. I understand this possible problems. The examples with Chinese text that could be understood only if it is read from the book but not understood when it said reminds of some puns and word games that you come accross in other languages. The proverbs do come from ancient times. And when the meaning of the words is too ambiguous that it can't be understood then it should be substitued with a different word or described? As far as I know the stucture of Vietnamese is similar to Chinese and they also have one syllable words with various meaning. Lots of homophones that can be understood by the context. They did use Chinese characters, which are no longer in use.

I know Russian proverbs that use old words meanings of those is either forgotten or changed (good example: Red Square in Moscow didn't mean "red" at all but "beautiful". "krasnaya" (feminine adjective for "red" in modern Russian and feminine form of adjective "beautiful" in old Russian)).

I wonder how some people in China feel about having to learn to read and write thousands hanzi, when their interest is more in learning other sciences - art, music, whatever, or maybe just because they are a bit lazy to do it. I live in Australia and I had Chinese colleagues who came to Australia as children. Some of them have very basic knowledge of Chinese and can't write Chinese at all. They lose their roots, because they find it too hard to learn to read and write in Chinese.

It takes a few years at primary school, doesn't it, to become literate. I am learning Japanese and some Chinese only because I have a deep interest in it but languages, in the modern world are used for communication, not to make people's life harder. On some site devoted to learning Chinese, they said rich people deliberately made characters harder and more complicated, so that reading and writing them could only be accessible to upper class not ordinary people.

Again, I am not suggesting anything (like changing over to phonetic writing), just asking people's opinion on the topic.

[floreo]

Hola,
Well, I will begin with your original issue " PinYin" alphabetic system for chinese pronunciation. It's quite odd, tho we chinese use Letras Romanas( roman letters) we don't acutally pronouse them like they should be in latin language. The reason is because after the liberation of China, yet under the influences of those very radical linguists, originally this kind of influence came from Sovient Union as they use roman letters, we chinese thought we should have ourselves more close to the system which seemed in everyway better than our own's, including the language system. The most celebrated linguist 王力 said the romanization of the chinese language was possible and there would be one day all the chinese use letters instead of the characters. This above you can find in his early linguistic works. That's why we started to use roman letters in representing the unique sound of the old chinese and this is why there are some characters which are pronounced very different in Mainland China and in Taiwan. It's because they use the chinese dictionary which were compiled around 1930 titled 辞海. If you go for that dictionary you will find those typical Taiwan pronouciations are not truely unique at all as they were supposed to be prounuced like that before the 1949 Liberation.
The saying that modern madarin has fewer sounds than ancient chinese is so wrong. Ancient chinese don't possess so many sounds as we have today. We don't have sound like F in our archaic language. Let's say the letter" R "in Pinyin which you will be more familiar with than other ones cause its distictiveness. Here in Wu dialect we don't have that retroflection sound and kids who attend their primary schools often have problem with that sound. All because it doesn't exist in our dialect. Obivously, Wu dialect preserves many unique features of Anicent Chinese. This is the very reason that we can't make that sound right when we were very young. And this is the reason we say 日 like 你 here in Wu dialect. And this has been proven by those linguists far back in Qing Dynasty and is no longer a point of disscusion which sure made my sesquipedalian explanation pointless on account of that.
And about the picturesqueness of chinese characters I should say Pinyin does not and could not debilitate that pintorous conveyance of chinese characters. Actually, Pinyin helped the learing of chinese for both natives and foreigner tho the original motive for creating the alphabetic chinese pronunciation system didn't purely aiming at the facilating of the chinese study, yet it helped ultimately!

[Mark]

In romanisations of Russian, X is usually used as a KH sound, Q is usually not used at all, ZH is usually used for a ZH sound as in PLEASURE, etc.

[iforem]

hi，folks

I admin Chinese is very hard to learn,but Chinese is not only for Chinese.Anybody will be able to master.

The other day i watched the CCTV-4 and found some foreigners who
spoke Chinese very fluently.I was very surprised and admired them.

My english is poor,i am regretful than i can not express myself optionally.

I am very glad to helper someone who are in trouble in learning Chinese.

[Polack]

Hanyu Pinyin was created when the mainland was under Soviet influence. That's why it uses "x" where Taiwanese use "hs". In cyrilic script "x" denotes quite a similar sound, but for non-Russian speakers it does not make any sense.

[Helmut]

floreo wrote
> Well, I will begin with your original issue " PinYin" alphabetic
> system for chinese pronunciation. It's quite odd, tho we chinese use
> Letras Romanas( roman letters) we don't acutally pronouse them like
> they should be in latin language.

Well, nobody today pronounces roman letters strictly as they have been pronounced in Latin. Not even the Italians, not the Spanish, and surely not the English or French. Every people has its own interpretation of roman letters. After all, the roman alphabet was made for Latin. Everyone else using it is forced to make some adaptations to reflect the different sounds. So it is by no means odd to have a Chinese Hanyu Pinyin interpretation of roman letters. And honestly, I think Hanyu Pinyin is just as close to a "correct pronunciation" of roman letters as any modern European language.


> The reason is because after the liberation of China, yet under the
> influences of those very radical linguists, originally this kind of
> influence came from Sovient Union as they use roman letters, we
> chinese thought we should have ourselves more close to the system
> which seemed in everyway better than our own's, including the
> language system.

Russia (then the Soviet Union) uses a cyrillic alphabet, not roman letters. The cyrillic alphabet would have been at least as suitable for Mandarin as the roman alphabet. The choice to use the roman alphabet for Hanyu Pinyin seems to me more a sign of independence from the Soviet Union.


Polack wrote
> Hanyu Pinyin was created when the mainland was under Soviet
> influence. That's why it uses "x" where Taiwanese use "hs". In
> cyrilic script "x" denotes quite a similar sound, but for
> non-Russian speakers it does not make any sense.

I beg to differ. The cyrillic letter that looks like a roman letter "X" sounds very different from Hanyu Pinyin's "X" as does the English "X". Russian does have a sound that is somewhat similar, but they use a different letter for that. So for a Russian native speaker the use of the "X" in Hanyu Pinyin appears no less odd than for an English native speaker.
So where does it come from ? I do not know. Maybe they copied the Greek "X", which can sound similar. (Linguists often know some Greek.) Maybe they just needed an unused letter.
Personally, I cannot see that either "X" or "HS" is better suited than the other. There is a sound that does not exist in popular western languages, so you have to invent something. Both are just as fine.

[James Campbell]

I believe that in Spanish and Portuguese renderings of Central and Southern American Indian names, this "x" sound is used with approximately the same sound as in Chinese. And to consider that the Portuguese were a presence in China during Europe's years of colonialism, it is not unlikely that this is borrowed from Portuguese.

Much of the Cyrillic alphabet was borrowed from Greek with a few additions. The 'chi' (X) in Greek is the same letter and same pronunciation as the Russian and has absolutely no relation with the use of 'x' in Chinese pinyin.

In fact the Russian cyrillicization of Chinese has its own system.

[IronMonkey]

All of the educated Chinese people I know who come from Mainland China know how to use PinYin.

IronMonkey

[Zhongguoren]

Zhongguo Zhengfu shuo: "zai Hanzi buneng huozhe bu fangbian de shihou yong Pinyin."

[abc]

<<Huanle de Hai>> jiushi yong Pinyin xie3 de wenxue zuopin.