No, you system is unworkable, and it’s quite obvious that you never even bothered to read the long posts back on page one of the thread in which I raised point after point explaining exactly why it’s useless or worse, because you haven’t yet addressed a single point I’ve made. You can sit there with your claim that everyone else is just “close-minded”, and the world’s too invested in preserving the status quo to listen to your keen insights, but you’re starting to sound like Jack Dean Tyler here. (Is that the name?) If you are frustrated that no one’s taking you seriously, well, I’m not taking you seriously because I gave many, many reasons why your system is completely useless and you have yet to address them.
And if you thing “Shang” is a good spelling of the first syllable of <Xiang Gang> (which it’s not - it’s ridiculously incorrect and no native English speaker would ever leap to pronounce it correctly - for starters, the final begins with a glide, <iang>), how exactly do you intend to spell the common word <shang>? Much worse is your attempt to spell <chi> “chee” - do you actually speak any Mandarin? Because that’s so ridiculously incorrect that it would confuse the hell out of anyone who actually spoke the language. Which - as I’ve said a hundred times - is the problem. You simply can’t spell out a lot of Mandarin words well enough to even approximate them in the bounds of English phonetics. Because, you know, Mandarin is not English.
I can’t believe you’re starting with that “the man is trying to keep my brilliant ideas down!” bullshit. What do you do for a job? I’m guessing you sell homeopathic medicines, right? Because that’s the only field where people actually believe that idiotic nonargument.
Hey, hey, hey, learn our names. I’m the rational one here!
See, this is precisely the foaming at the mouth ranting I am referring to. I thought we’re suppose to leave the profanities in the pit? Nice personal attack there too. While I don’t sell or use homeopathic medicines, I’m open minded enough to admit that it could help others, even if it’s just a placebo.
I believe better, more phonetic spellings exist, so I’ll just agree to disagree with you.
This is not “ranting”. This is frustration with the fact that you - yet again - post without addressing any of the many points I’ve made that illustrate the ill-conceivedness of your point. Go back to my first posts in response to what you said, and address the many points I made.
All you’ve argued here is that many pinyin spellings are not immediately clear to non-Mandarin speakers. You haven’t even explained why anyone should care about that. You haven’t addressed the fact that spellings that are immediately clear to non-Mandarin speakers are impossible. You haven’t addressed the fact that nothing about pinyin is designed to make Mandarin clear to those who don’t speak it. You haven’t addressed the fact that your spellings aren’t clear either. You haven’t addressed a single counterargument. Until you do, no one is going to regard your argument with any seriousness, and I don’t see why you think we should.
And the fact that you consider your spellings “more phonetic” illustrates, furthermore, that you don’t know what the word “phonetic” means.
That’s fine, as for two days now you’ve chosen not to argue with logical explanations of why your method couldn’t possibly work. You’ve chosen not to argue even when I went to the trouble of summarizing some of the responses I first gave you. You have nothing to support your argument - nothing at all. You have made a grand total of one point - and that point isn’t relevant anyway. You have proven only one thing: pinyin is not readable to people who don’t speak Chinese, and as has been pointed out - your point is much weaker than you pretend, since you’ve only got imagined naive pronunciations and (despite my asking for cites) you haven’t come up with any evidence that people really do pronounce pinyin as badly as you claim.
What’s grown obvious - and not just to me, but to the other readers of this thread - which includes competent (even native!) speakers of Mandarin and linguists, all people who understand this subject far better than you - is that you’re arguing only from your own personal ignorance. Not only do you not understand the words you’re using (as evidenced by your use of the word “phonetic”), you don’t understand the subject you’re arguing about either. So you’ve come up instead with nonarguments about how we’re “ivory tower intellectuals” who only care about “protecting the status quo.” I guess that’s the only response possible when you won’t admit you’re wrong but have shown repeatedly that you’re simply incapable of arguing the merits.
I know a Chinese woman, in Toastmasters, named Xiao He. Others addressing her pronounce her name “Show Huh.” (Show as in “shower,” and Huh as the English “grunting” word.")
As another mentioned, it’s not workable. Your system isn’t a system. It’s a hodgepodge of what you think would be nice for you.
At least you’ve now identified it as an opinion. May I ask what your qualifications are for judging the scientific basis of Pinyin or even Bopomofo?
A scientific improvement wouldn’t be howled about by those of a scientific bent regarding the matter. The actual reason Pinyin hasn’t been improved is because it’s actually, honestly, and truly a scientifically produced method.
No. The simple fact which you continue to insist on ignoring (and even belittling) is that Pinyin is completely readable and completely phonetic. What you have a hangup about is that it’s not English. Well, Pinyin wasn’t designed to be English. It was designed, and it functions very well, as a means of phonetically representing one particular Chinese language.
Take a trip over to www.omniglot.com and tell me what you think of Cherokee’s syllabary.
Good illustration of the problems of using English-based methods to transcribe foreign sounds - <pao> sounds like the English word “pow”, but <shao> doesn’t sound like the English word “show”, because of the notorious inconsistency of English spelling. <Xiao He> would be pronounced more like “shyow hoo” (with the second syllable having the same vowel as “look” or “book”. And <x> only sounds vaguely like “sh”, but that’s the closest English equivalent.)
Doh! and duibuqi. Reading and posting from a pda is my excuse.
As for Controvert’s knee how/ni hao example, anyone not familiar with the silent “k” sound (eg much of the world), would be pronouncing it with 3 syllables as in “k” “nee” “how”. that would certainly help next time you’re in Beijing
A slight aside, if you don’t mind. At my school, there is one Chinese teacher. She’s from the People’s Republic of China. last Friday, the school vice principal suggested to her that she should also teach her students Bopomofo. The look on the teacher’s face was priceless. Her response was, “I don’t think that’s a good idea at all.” Said in a very terse manner.
I’m not sure why anyone outside of Taiwan would want to learn bopomofo? It’s a special character system for learning characters and proununciation but not overly practical to learning Chinese as a second language. I learned bopomofo when I first went to taiwan, and then promptly quit using it as any of the romanization systems were much more practical for me.
Now, if bopomofo was used like the Japanese katakana for foreign words then I think it would be very useful. But then it would be borrowing from the Japanese or Korean, and therefore unacceptable.
Only a couple of weeks ago we had another English-is-the-center-of-the-world thread complaining that Polish isn’t spelled phonetically. As it happens, of course, Polish spelling is such that pronunciation from the written word is never ambiguous.
I don’t know any Chinese, really. But looking at examples of romanizing Chinese that I was familiar with (“Beijing”) and examples from this thread (“hao” “Xiang” “Xiao”), I’m glad they don’t look like English. It’s immediately obvious to me that there are sounds being represented that are different from English. It’s easy enough to find out rough “English” equivalents for the sounds if I just want to get some resemblance of the word out. (Admittedly, until I did I’d have difficulty reading long texts with Chinese names, as I don’t retain names very well unless I can hear them in my head.) I really do not want to be seduced into thinking I know how the word is supposed to sound when I don’t. A foreign language is a foreign language, after all.
Let me illustrate with an anecdote. When I was preparing for an extended stay in Poland, I began reading Polish literature. Three of the most important books in late 19th century Polish literature are the Sienkiewicz trilogy of historical novels set in the 17th century. I picked them up early in my reading. Much to my frustration, the only translation I could get a hold of decided that English readers were too wimpy to figure out how to pronounce Polish names in their native spelling. They did not provide an introduction that defined this “transliteration” system, so I could just barely begin to guess how the names were really spelled. And I also had no idea how dumbed down this system was. I was really uncomfortable because their system guaranteed that I wouldn’t know how to pronounce the names properly! Plus, I would have no clue where I was likely to be making errors – Polish has sounds that English doesn’t, and I had a suspiscion they were leaving some sounds out to spare us the difficulty of the infamous Slavic consonant clusters. Fortunately, I had access to a Polish friend who was familiar with the places and characters in the story.
On another note, in addition to the issues that have already been discussed at length, the Controsystem has the deficiencies of taking a lot more space and not showing word divisions.
The Controvert - if you’re really interested in this subject, I suggest that you check out the Yale romanization method for Mandarin Chinese. It is probably closer to what you think makes sense for an American studying Chinese.
IIRC a linguistic attempt by some professors at Yale to produce a romanization system originally for the military language training and for students. Yale had a good chinese program, and a lot of collateral for learning Chinese as a second language (stories, simplified novels, movies, movie scripts, etc) at the time.
The fact that it hasn’t even been mentioned in this thread shows the lack of adoption.
Yale romanization is actually considerably easier for non-Mandarin speakers to read, but it still doesn’t mean it’s easy. I suspect it hasn’t been adopted because pinyin was made official by the PRC, and so there’s a lot more real-world utility in learning pinyin than in using one romanization in textbooks in the U.S. and running into another in China.