From @UGA.CC.UGA.EDU:owner-ccnet-l@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Fri Mar 19 11:10:10 1993
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Date:         Fri, 19 Mar 1993 14:42:54 GMT
Reply-To: "L.S.Ng" <L.S.Ng1@SOUTHAMPTON.AC.UK>
Sender: Chinese Computing Network <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
From: "L.S.Ng" <L.S.Ng1@SOUTHAMPTON.AC.UK>
Subject:      Re: Pinyin of Chinese characters
Comments: To: NCHUS289@TWNMOE10.BITNET
To: Multiple recipients of list CCNET-L <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
In-Reply-To:  <no.id>; from "Hu Chih-Po" at Mar 19, 93 6:22 pm
Status: RO

>
> Does anyone know how to spell the Chinese characters using Roman characters?
> eg." Hua Xia Wen Zhai " , "You3 Tian2 Shui2 Lai2 Geng1", "Bu4 Shou3".
> Does there have a rule about it ?  In the "Bu4 Shou3", what the meaning of
"4"
> or "3". Thank your help in advance !
>           My BITnet ip : nchus289@twnmoe10   , I am a new user,nice to meet
you
>

I am not sure I have the authority to answer your question. But I think I can
help because I am a Malaysian -- in the early 80s, schools there still taught
BoPoMoFo but now HanyuPinyin, so is the case for Jiantizi and Fantizi. So
Malaysians were kind of CAUGHT between both worlds. But now it seems we are
right in choosing to follow Beijing.

If you know BoPoMoFo, then it would be fantastic.
Hanyu Pinyin is simple. It is just the BoPoMoFo written the Roman Characters.
It is a straght forward one-to-one mapping. If you don't, perhaps this won't
help much.


ZhuyinFuHao  HanyuPinyin
wave     Bo - B
break    Po - P
touch    Mo - M
buddha   Fo - F

virtue   De - D
special  Te - T
         Ne - N
happy    Le - L

brother  Ge - G
         Ke - K
peace    He - H

chicken  Ji - J
bully    Qi - Q
west     Xi - X

       Zhi  - Zh
       Chi  - Ch
poem   Shi  - Sh
sun     Ri  - R     (Taiwanese used to pronounce as Ji?)

        Zi  - Z
        Ci  - C
think   Si  - S

one     yi  - i
black   wu  - u
fish   yuu  - u    as in Nu (female)

         a  - a
         o  - o
         e  - e    as in e (goose)
         e  - e  as in Xie4 Xie4 (thank you)

sad     ai  - ai
        ei  - ei  as in hei (balck)
        ao  - ao
        ou  - ou

safe    an  - an
        en  - en
dirty  ang  - ang
       eng  - eng
son     er  - r

1 2 3 4 are the tones of Yin(negative) Yang(positive) Shang(up) Qu(go) or
Gao(High) Yang(rise) Zhuan(turn) Jiang(down).

From @UGA.CC.UGA.EDU:owner-ccnet-l@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Sat Mar 20 01:19:10 1993
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Date:         Sat, 20 Mar 1993 15:14:35 -0800
Reply-To: Shann Wei-Chang <shann@DONGPO.MATH.NCU.EDU.TW>
Sender: Chinese Computing Network <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
From: Shann Wei-Chang <shann@DONGPO.MATH.NCU.EDU.TW>
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Status: RO

Hu Chih-Po from Taiwan asked:

> Does anyone know how to spell the Chinese characters using Roman characters?
> eg." Hua Xia Wen Zhai " , "You3 Tian2 Shui2 Lai2 Geng1", "Bu4 Shou3".
> Does there have a rule about it ?  In the "Bu4 Shou3", what the meaning of "4"
> or "3". Thank your help in advance !

Of course there are rules.  I taught a course about UNIX and networks.
I used ccnet and chpoem as examples for mailing lists.  And I tried to tell
the students that pinyin is better then bopomofo.  So I prepared a few
documents maybe helpful for Chinese on Taiwan.  Please get the files
from the anonymous ftp site in dongpo.math.ncu.edu.tw (140.115.25.3),
under /pub/shann/chinese/pinyin, get ZY2PN.tab and ZYvsPY.doc.  The
doc file may be out of date.  I have never read it after it was written.

A quick answer to your last question: 1 2 3 4 are the four tones in Chinese.

-Shann

From @UGA.CC.UGA.EDU:owner-ccnet-l@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Thu Jun  3 17:32:39 1993
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Date:         Thu, 3 Jun 1993 18:13:43 -0400
Reply-To: Thomas Bartlett <BARTLETT%HUSC.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu>
Sender: Chinese Computing Network <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
From: Thomas Bartlett <BARTLETT%HUSC.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu>
Subject:      Re: History of Bopomofo ?
Comments: To: boon kang <BOONKANG@BCSC02.BITNET>
To: Multiple recipients of list CCNET-L <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
Status: RO

It is sometimes forgotten that many of the people who set about to reform
the Chinese language, among other things, studied in Japan and knew the
Japanese language.  Liang Ch'i-ch'ao, Lu Xun, Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek,
and Yang Buwei were only a few of many notable such persons.  Many of the
most commonly used vocabularies of the modern Chinese language were actually
borrowed by these and other Chinese from terms that were invented in Japan
by Japanese scholars who knew classical Chinese and modern Western
languages both very well.  For example, "fengjian", used to mean "feudal"
in present usage, is actually a traditional Chinese Confucian value, used
by the Japanese of the Meiji Period to translate (not necessarily with
Marxist implications) the Western word "feudalism".  Since Japanese
society itself was in the 19th century very "feudal" in ways similar to
traditional European society, the Japanese were very much interested in
finding a TRADITIONAL East Asian term to describe a concept that was both
new and also in some ways familiar.  You may also be interested to know
that  the Japanese kana, which apparently inspired the invention of
bo,po,mo,fo, were originally just simplifications of Chinese characters,
used only for their sound, with the graphic meaning being entirely lost.
And of course, some of Chinese phoettic letters (called bo,mo,po, fo) can
be found in Chinese dictionaries with original meanings as true Chinese
characters: e.g. "you4" meaning "again", "yao1" meaning "young", etc.  For
further reading on the subject you might look up books by Yuen Ren CHAO
who participated in the language reform movement of the 1920's or of John
DeFrancis who has written about modern Chinese language reform in the
whole 20th century.

TCB

On Thu, 3 Jun 1993, boon kang wrote:

>    Can anyone give an outline of how the
>    bopomofo scheme was originated ?
>
>    Someone suggested to me that the scheme
>    was the product of Japanese influence.
>    Is this a valid statement ?

From @UGA.CC.UGA.EDU:owner-ccnet-l@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Thu Jun  3 18:23:28 1993
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Date:         Thu, 3 Jun 1993 15:48:26 -0700
Reply-To: twxie@UCDAVIS.EDU
Sender: Chinese Computing Network <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
From: Tianwei Xie <twxie@UCDAVIS.EDU>
Subject:      Re: History of Bopomofo ?
Comments: To: boon kang <BOONKANG%BCSC02.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu>
Comments: cc: Multiple recipients of list CCNET-L <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list CCNET-L <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
In-Reply-To:  <9306031846.AA15852@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Status: RO

On Thu, 3 Jun 1993, boon kang wrote:

>    Can anyone give an outline of how the
>    bopomofo scheme was originated ?
>
>    Someone suggested to me that the scheme
>    was the product of Japanese influence.
>    Is this a valid statement ?

The academic name for Bopomofo is zhuyin zimu. It was not directly
related to Japanese kanas.

Before 1911, at the later stage of Qing dynasty, some scholars believed
that character reform was one of the means to save China. Lu Ganzhang and
others advocated "qieyin zi", Cai Xiyong and others advocated the
stenographic system, while Zhu Wenxiong and others proposed the Romanized
sytem. Lu Ganzhang's "qieyin zi" was classified as a system which was
similar to Japanese kanas to some scholars.

After 1911, Cai Yuanpei, the Minister of Education of the Republic
proposed to adopt "zhuyin zimu" to popularize education. In 1919, a
committee was formed to create a spelling system. After long discussions,
the "zhuyin zimu" was developed and was made public for use in November
1918. All the "zimu" were selected from the ANCIENT CHINESE CHARACTERS
(not the Japanese kanas.) Each syllable has three components. They were
supposed be used to indicate the pronunciation of characters.

Bopomofo zhuyin zimu was the first legal spelling system. It was
recognized by the government and was used by educational institutions for
educational purposes.

Some minor changes were made afterwards.

+-------------------------------+
| Tim Xie                       |
| Dept. of Chinese and Japanese |
| University of California      |
| Davis, CA 95616               |
| Phone and Fax: 916-758-5014   |
+-------------------------------+

From @UGA.CC.UGA.EDU:owner-ccnet-l@UGA.CC.UGA.EDU Tue Aug 10 09:48:50 1993
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Date:         Tue, 10 Aug 1993 16:45:03 +0200
Reply-To: Zhenbing Zeng <zeng@MATHEMATIK.UNI-BIELEFELD.DE>
Sender: Chinese Computing Network <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
From: Zhenbing Zeng <zeng@MATHEMATIK.UNI-BIELEFELD.DE>
Subject:      Taiwan Pinyin
Comments: To: ccnet-l@uga.cc.uga.edu
To: Multiple recipients of list CCNET-L <CCNET-L@uga.cc.uga.edu>
Status: RO

Hi,
Aeveral years ago I read from a newspaper in China that Taiwan Eduacation
Administration has simplified the Gwoyu Romatz to a new version:

      b p m f d t n l g k h j ch=[q] sh=[x] j=[zh] ch sh r tz=[z] ts=[c] s
      a o e i u iu=[u"] er ai ei uei=[ui] au=[ao] ou iou=[iu] ie iue=[u"e]
      an en in uen=[un] iun=[u"n] ang eng ing ung=[ong] iung=[iong]

This system is very like Hanyu Pinyin. Can any one give more information
about this system? Does anyone know if this pinyin is used in school in
Taiwan?

Lao Zeng
Dept of Math, Uni Bielefeld

From easug-error@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu Tue Oct 25 17:02:07 1994
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Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 08:53:11 -0400 (EDT)
From: Weng Fatt Fong <wfong@VNET.IBM.COM>
Subject: Expansion of pinyin
To: easug@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu
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Status: RO

TAN@CWU.EDU wrote...

|I have the following ideas on developing various pinyin spellings to make
|it an independent writing system, not just transcription for the Chinese
|characters.

Just two points in respond to your proposal:
1. The debate over whether Chinese characters should be replaced by
   a romanised system has long been a sore point of contention between
   linguists of different schools. From a purely cultural point of view,
   I don't think 5,000 years of a large portion of human-kind culture
   should be given up without deeper analysis. And cognitive studies
   have shown that the human mind thinks in terms of images or pictures,
   of which Chinese characters closely resemble to.

2. The Chinese language has really about 1,000 single-character "words"
   and the rest are phrases made up of two or more characters.
   If you use the proper tone/accent for the first character in a
   multi-character phrase, you already have more than 95% unique
   matches. Which partly explains why input methods such as Shuangping
   are popular with the occasional Chinese text users.

Just my two cents worth to start the day....
Weng Fatt Fong (wfong@vnet.ibm.com)
IBM CANADA LAB (Toronto)
** My words are my own; they do not represent the views of my
** employer or my organization.

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From: TAN@CWU.EDU
Subject: Expansion of pinyin
To: easug@guvax.acc.georgetown.edu
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Status: RO

I have the following ideas on developing various pinyin spellings to make
it an independent writing system, not just transcription for the Chinese
characters. 

The start point is that the current pinyin has too few spelling variations
to represent so many homophones in hanzi. Pinyin has only 400-odd
syllables in terms of alphabetic spellings, and about 1,200 syllables
counting the tones.  In addition, each syllable has only one form of
spelling. 

In comparison, English has approximately 8,000 syllables, and many of
which have more than one writing form.  Following are some examples of 
English: 

1. to, too, two; 2. rite, right, write; 3. here, hear; 4. flour, flower; 
5. son, sun; 6. their, there; 7. in, inn; 8. meat, meet; 9. I, eye; and
many others. 

Furthermore, each pinyin phoneme, too, has only one written form, but many
English phonemes, again, have more.  For instance (the letters in brackets
are International Phonetic Alphabet): 

Vowels:
[ei]: a(make), ei(feign), ay(day), ai(daily), ey(grey);
[ai]: i(bike), y(by), ye(bye), uy(buy), ie(tie);
[ou]: o(mode), ow(blow), oe(toe), oa(boat);
[i:]: ee(bee), ea(tea), ey(key), ie(field), ui(build);

Consonants:
[f]: f(fee), ph(phone), gh (tough);
[k]: k(kit), ch(chasm), ck(check), c(cat);
[s]: s(see), c(cent);

etc.   

Please note that in above lists, there are some vowel combinations and
digraph that are not used in pinyin, so why don't we use them to form
various spellings to represent the Chinese homophones?  For instance, if
we just make it that 'ay' and 'ey' are pronounced as 'ei', and 'ph' as f
in pinyin, we can have fei, fay, fey, phei, phay, and phey, for the
homophones of fei. 

In another transliteration system of the Chinese characters, the 'x' takes
the form of 'hs'.  Then the 'hs' can be brought into pinyin while the 
'x'still being kept, to vary the representation of homophones. 

There is another phenomenon in English that can help the expansion of
pinyin.  Following are the examples: 

1.(k)nock, 2. (g)narl, 3.(h)onor, 4.(m)nemonics, 5.(p)sychology, 6.(w)rite, 
7. de(b)t, 8.lis(t)en, 9.i(s)land, 10.r(h)ino, 11.depo(t), 12.lam(b), 
13.yea(h), 14.colum(n), 15.plou(gh), etc. 

In all the above words, the letters in the parentheses are not pronounced,
still English speakers are able to get used to them.  These letters take
place at the beginning, end, or in the middle of a word.  If pinyin, too,
can take such extra letters in its spellings, we can further create more
different forms for the homophones.  Then, kfei, kfay and kfey may be
added to the pronunciation of fei. 

As a matter of fact, we can create more digraphs, combinations of vowels,
and use more unpronounced letters to distinguish the homophones. Once
pinyin renders each Chinese character a unique spelling, I assume it will
be able to function as an independent writing system, same as hanzi. 

Your are welcome to make comments and criticism on the above ideas. 

Tan

