Subject: Expansion of pinyin

From: Weng Fatt Fong <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 08:53:11 -0400 (EDT)

[email-masked] 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 ([email-masked])
IBM CANADA LAB (Toronto)
** My words are my own; they do not represent the views of my
** employer or my organization.