Paul O. Bartlett | Re: [LFN] INEPENDENT OR FINAL

• Autor: Paul O. Bartlett (“bartlett22183”)
• Tema: Re: [LFN] INEPENDENT OR FINAL
• Data: 2005-05-29 23:30
• Mesaje: 1284 (a supra, presedente, seguente)

On Sun, 29 May 2005, George Boeree wrote (trimmed):

> The only problem I can see it that I believe there is a distinction in
> pinyin between liu and lü, and between niu and nü.  Since we do not use
> an umlaut, we cannot make the distinction in LFN.  Of course, in
> technical work with the chinese language, people can do whatever they
> need to.  We don't even distinguish the tones in ordinary, day-to-day
> transciption!

     I suggest that there may be such a thing as being too pure when
trying to shoehorn a foreign word into a target language's orthography.
Look at a lot (most?) of newspapers in the USA.  Even when writing
foreign words and names from western European languages, they do not
use correct diacritics of the original languages, and the results are
fairly ridiculous at times.  In the days of electronic typesetting, I
see no real excuse for this.  Even on a list such as this, I see no
problem with assimilating words in such character sets as ISO Latin-1.

--
Paul O. Bartlett

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