From pycyn@aol.com Sat Jun 24 17:43:24 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 10943 invoked from network); 25 Jun 2000 00:43:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m3.onelist.org with QMQP; 25 Jun 2000 00:43:22 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r11.mx.aol.com) (152.163.225.65) by mta3 with SMTP; 25 Jun 2000 00:43:22 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r11.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v27.10.) id a.7f.625d5ec (9243) for ; Sat, 24 Jun 2000 20:43:16 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: <7f.625d5ec.2686afa3@aol.com> Date: Sat, 24 Jun 2000 20:43:15 EDT Subject: PLEA: Chinese names To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com At the risk of starting the discussion again, can I declare that, lacking the selcmene to pick their own, we base Chinese names (and titles) as much as possible on the best information we have about actual pronunciation -- Mandarin in general, other dialects if we know them to apply. This involves usually (i.e., for Mandarin) taking the tense/lax as voiceless/voiced, the retroflex fricatives and affricates as palatal, /ng/ as /n/ (and maybe /n/ as /m/ in final position), syllabic fricatves (including r) as vowel free where possible, with /y/ where a vowel is necessary (or /r/ in the case of the retroflex fricatives), and let the vowels duke it out as best we can -- downplaying /y/ in favor of pinyin spelling (or some alternative) just to keep some contrasts.