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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

Care to expand on the faults of pinyin, and how they are more erroneous than say the German spelling reform?

My experience with pinyin is that it is very robust, and I don't remember ever encountering pinyin that was ambiguous about how it is read (unlike written English or romanized Japanese). I have also never heard of standard Chinese syllables that are lacking a clear mapping onto pinyin.

To me that is very impressive.

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Compare "xi an" with "xian". One is 2 words and one is 1 word. But for some reason Chinese people don't like to put spaces in between words so "xi an shi" is often written as "xi'anshi" which is different from "xianshi".

But that's what you have the apostrophe for in Pinyin. Works fine.

But pinyin isn't Chinese so your point just doesn't exist.

Mandarin speakers are seem to be fairly sloppy with their own phonetic alphabets - you're supposed to have spaces in bopomofo and apostrophes in pinyin to handle cases like these, but they often don't bother.

It becomes clearer with tones I guess, "Xi1 An1" vs "Xian1". But again, proper pinyin with tones seems to be a foreigner thing... I don't recall seeing tone marks or numbers on street signs.

Well of course it's not ambiguous like English because they had no historical baggage. But properly romanized Japanese is also never ambiguous.

"ene" can be えね and えんえ.

> But properly romanized Japanese is also never ambiguous.

What is "properly romanised Japanese" anyway? There are several modern systems in use [1] often mixed together (Even the government can't stick to the government mandated Kunrei-shiki). Some system represent ず and づ the same, some represent ティ and チー the same, some represent じ and ぢ the same. ō represents both O+O and O+U

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese#Moder...

えんえ should be en'e according to the govenment system. ティ is used exclusively in loan words anyway as far as I'm aware. Wouldn't you just write it in its original language?

Also the other ones he mentioned are pronounced the exact same way.

(you probably know this but) zu du and zi di do make a difference in terms of which kanji are used. The government has been reforming kanji readings over time though E.g. 藤ふぢ → ふじ or 図ヅ (look at the character in the box!)→ ず

Leaving out the apostrophe for えんえ is not standard in any of the three systems. Mixing and matching the systems is also not what I meant by "proper."

I thought 花 and 鼻 were ambiguous in most romanizations - at least I would write it as "hana" in all romanizations I can think of, yet the pitch accent differs. No?

I would think the parent is referring to unambiguous in terms of pronunciation. You're right in that you wouldn't know which character was originally used in isolation—or whether kanji was used at all.

As far as I know, there's little (any?) pitch accent that distinguishes between words in Japanese. What pitch accent are you referring to?

Every word in Japanese has a standard pitch accent and some otherwise homophonous ones differ in pitch accent. However, from one dialect to another the pitch accents on the same word can be totally different so I don't think they're usually a big hindrance to communication. Pitch accent differs from English stress accent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

To be clear, you're saying that pitch can change due to regional accent, as opposed to distinguish between homophones, which is which is what 'singhblom was implying, correct?

I thought 花 and 鼻 were ambiguous … yet the pitch accent differs. No?

It does both things. Pitch accent is the only thing distinguishing some homophones (hana, hasi, ame, kumo) but it's also got variation in dialects including a handful where the Tokyo and Osaka versions have the same distinction between two words except with the opposite meaning (sorry, I don't have examples off the top of my head).

Fortunately there aren't that many sentences where it's equally plausible you meant both spider and cloud.

Interesting. Admittedly not a native speaker, I never found pitch accent used to distinguish between homophones during my time in Japan, nor was it introduced in any of the courses I took on Japanese while I was there, including the examples you provide.

I majored in Japanese and it wasn't really seriously introduced until I studied in Japan and I'd already been studying Japanese for three years. But while not learning it won't hinder your ability to communicate too much it can help you sound more natural. NHK publishes a dictionary of pitch accent in standard Tokyo dialect: https://www.amazon.co.jp/NHK-%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E7%...

Thanks for the reference! Could I trouble you to provide an example from that text that describes such a homophone (as opposed to regional dialect) distinction?

The examples I gave upthread all have pairs with different accents in hyozyungo.

Okay. I was hoping for quotes from the text itself.

There are systems (basically what looks like a long sideways L) but you're right that romanization doesn't record pitch accent. But there are big regional variations in pitch accent and people won't have trouble understanding you if you use the wrong one, mostly (and you could level the same complaint at hiragana or katakana, after all).

Nevertheless, that's a fair point that I wasn't really thinking about.

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