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RE: Pinyin

Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com> Thu, 25 September 2008 15:46 UTC

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From: Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com>
To: Michael Everson <everson@evertype.com>, ietflang IETF Languages Discussion <ietf-languages@iana.org>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 08:46:37 -0700
Subject: RE: Pinyin
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From: ietf-languages-bounces@alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces@alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Michael Everson

>> What you perceive as a logical generalisation, the native speakers
>> may see as a racist generalisation.
>
> OK, this is over the top.
>
> The fact is that "Pinyin" refers to a particular use of the Latin
> alphabet... whose properties... make it quite unique as
> regards other orthographies. In addition to Mandarin, the Chinese
> themselves apply this alphabet to other Chinese languages as well as
> other languages of China.

Isn't that ignoring the politics of the region? By analogy, suppose Hindi orthography were a perfectly sufficient basis for transliterating Tamil: that wouldn't mean that Tamil speakers would have no objections to tagging their transliterated content "ta-hindi". Maybe "pinyin" isn't a problem for speakers of other languages, but I wouldn't want to assume that without investigation.



Peter

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