Subject: Chinese cmene still

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 12:56:56 EDT

Yuen Ren Chao, master linguist and egg-scrambler, wrote a paper on the 
non-uniqueness of phonemic solutions which drove a major nail in the coffin 
of positivist linguistics many years ago. In it he presented the phonetic 
facts of his dialect of Mandarin (his wife is from Anwhei, I'm not sure about 
him) and then demonstrated that these data equally justified a goodly number 
of different phonemic solutions, some of which were further justified by 
other facts (e.g., Chinese Pig Latin, historical information, and so on). 
The point is that none of these is "the right way to describe Chinese." But 
all work if used correctly. Of course, each of them was a system devised 
specifically for that Chinese dialect.
I am not sure (not having looked at Chinese data since about the time I read 
Chao, roughly 1962) whether Pinyin is actually a phonemic solution for any 
dialect or whether it incorporates a variety of elements, perhaps even 
inconsistent ones, in the interest of some political goals. But it is 
designed for Chinese and so does at least a fair job of representing Chinese 
sounds, when properly used. 
Lojban spelling, on the other hand, is designed for Lojban and, barring some 
open questions about a few sounds, does a good job for that language. But 
that language is different top to bottom from Mandarin Chinese. It is short 
a number of vowels and the ones it has are distributed very differently, its 
occlusives are voiced and voiceless rather than lax and tense voiceless (or 
unaspirated and aspirated), its affricates are palatal rather than often 
retroflex, its final nasals are labial and dental, rather than dental and 
velar, and Lojban has no tones.. Representing Chinese in this language is 
going to be very approximate at best and usually a clean miss in terms of 
actual sounds. The most that we can hope for is distinctive similarity and 
maybe some over all patterning. By and large we have that with the 
consonants as noted (the collapse of en and eng to /n/ aside -- that final 
fully form /g/ is even less appealing). The vowels remain a problem, 
especially a range of high vowels in front of /u/, back of /i/, above /y/ and 
with aberrant lip positions for the tongue positions, and the syllabic 
spirant(s), however described. By and large, the last of these can be dealt 
with simply as spirants, at the cost of a syllable: /djuandz/, /sma/ (plus a 
final C to be chosen later). The break in the Chinese pattern warns the 
aware that something odd is going on here and can be interpreted back to 
Chinese appropriately (the /ng/ could be as well, were it not ugly in its own 
right). That leaves the yeri and the umlaut, which can't be /ui/ or /iu/, 
since both of those are already used in the usual way. The other vowel 
combinations that might be suggestive are forbidden in a single syllable; 
writing them forces a /'/ between. 
The question then is how best to distribute these sounds out in a way that 
does the lest damage to the original (so that a knowledgeable person would 
have a reasonable chance of getting back to the original). Putting them all 
into /y/ is one possibility, another is spreading them into /i/, /u/, and /y/ 
according to some rule. Of course, putting things this way assumes a certain 
phonemic solution for the Chinese langauge involved -- there are other 
solutions which might solve the vowel problem nicely, but I recall them as 
creating matching problems then with the consonants, especially in the 
absence of tones.