Re: intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over bopomofo (for Chinese)??

"欲無言" == 欲無言 <yuwuyan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

欲無言> Is there any intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over
欲無言> bopomofo (for Chinese)?

I don't think so. Rather, I think the bopomofo alphabet adequately
represent Mandarin sounds (when tone marks are used), while the Latin
alphabet (even without tone marks) is inadequate.

Why? The Latin alphabet has only 26 letters, but Mandarin has more
sounds than that. Moreover, many letters in the Latin alphabet do not
map well to Chinese sounds. So, the compromise in Pinyin is to use
digraphs for some sounds (ch, sh, r, ng). The lack of a single Latin
letter for the "ng" sound found in so many language around the world
is a very big disadvantage of the Latin alphabet _worldwide_. Other
systems of Romanising Chinese include other tricks (such as using a
single letter for multiple sounds, exploiting some complementary
distributions) to overcome the inadequacy of the Latin alphabet.
Also, the Latin alphabet does not have tone marks. The current ones
used on Pinyin are not conveniently producible in printing, and is
often dropped when copied.

Another disadvantage of Pinyin is that it is quite length.
e.g. "chuang2" is as long as 6 letters (when tone mark is not counted
as a "letter"). How about bopomofo? That's just 3 letters plus a
tone mark. It's more compact. Due to this compactness, it is easier
to typeset bopomofo alongside Chinese characters (you can see this in
books for children in Taiwan), whether the characters are typeset
vertically (per tradition) or horizontally. Pinyin is too length to
work well like this, and won't work when typeset vertically! Further,
there is nothing that stops us from construction "block syllabaries"
from Bopomofo letters in same way of constructing Korean Hanguls from
Jamos.

One more advantage of Bopomofo: it reflects the syllable structure
"initial + final + tone" better than any Chinese Romanisation system
ever invented. Why "initial + final + tone"? Because that's the way
_traditional_ Chinese phonologists have been using for more than a
millennium. This model is important for poems where rhyming is
important. Even in ordinary modern Chinese texts, we often talk about
expressions with all syllables sharing a common initial (雙聲詞),
expressions with all syllables sharing a common final (疊韻詞) and
expressions that are both of these at the same time (雙聲疊韻詞).



欲無言> The following sentence says there is, though it doesn't
欲無言> specify what the advantage is.
>> 英語是拼音系統，
(Translation: English is a phonetic system.

But a broken one. You'd better treat it as a *mnemonic* spelling
system with phonetic *hints*.


>> 就拼音來說遠遠優於象形文字系統模仿拼音系統的假拼音
(Translation: [English] as a phonetic system is way better than
the Bopomofo, which is a fake phonetic system pretending to be one.)

I don't understand why you would consider the Bopomofo alphabet to be
a fake phonetic system. It is as genuine as the phonetic writing
systems as German and Spanish, if not more regular and exceptionless.

Perhaps, you could tell us whether you consider the current Korean
script to be a phonetic system. And if not, why not? If yes, then why
is the Bopomofo alphabet not a phonetic system.


P.S. I'm using the term "phonetic" loosely here.

--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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