Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwd | Hacker News Reader

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Pinyin was written by Chinese speakers for Chinese speakers. There are other romanizations written by westerners, and these are easier to see where the sounds come from; e.g., "tsai" rather than "cai".

What use is "q" as a letter at all in English? It makes a "k" sound and always occurs with a "u" after it. Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.)

"C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound?

As for "zhou" -- in English, z is very similar to an s, but voiced. So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced.

Lots of languages do this BTW. When people from Wycliffe want to translate a Bible into an obscure language without a writing system, they first have to invent a writing system. They could invent all new characters, but why? All it would do is make that language hard to type. So they take the sounds that language has, and map them onto Latin characters. Sometimes there's an obvious mapping, sometimes not.

Look up Welsh's spelling for another example of this.

> Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.)

What are you thinking of? There is no difference between those things.

But your major point here is correct; on the fundamentals there is no reason for the English alphabet to feature a Q.

> "C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound?

With the modern alphabet there's no reason for a C either. However, the answer to "why not use it for the 'ts' sound" is pretty obvious - that sound isn't part of the English phonemic inventory. It occurs, but that is almost always just a result of what is supposed to be a bare /t/ being followed by /s/ for grammatical reasons. (For an example of the general feeling here, note that an English word cannot start with /ts/ at all.) Why would we use any letter to represent the "ts" sound? We represent it the same way it exists in our language, as a sequence of two unrelated sounds.

> So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced.

Technically the only voiced consonants in pinyin are m / n / ng / l / r. I think a voicing contrast was present in Middle Chinese, and there's one today in Shanghainese and presumably other Wu dialects, but not in Mandarin.

> What are you thinking of? There is no difference between those things.

I'm talking about pinyin here. In Mandarin, there are to distinct sounds, one represented in pinyin by 'q', and one by 'ch'. It took me months to hear the difference, and months more to be able to pronounce them properly. I think there are other romanizations where the 'q' sound is represented "tch".

(In fact, I'm inclined to think that there are actually two different sounds in English as well; "witch" and "Charlie" don't feel the same in my mouth.)

> Technically the only voiced consonants in pinyin are m / n / ng / l / r.

I think we're using different definitions of "voiced". Other voiced / unvoiced pairs in English include g/k, b/p, v/f, z/s. See [1] for an "official" example of "voiced" being used the way I'm using it.

How else would you describe the difference between "qu" and "ju", or "chou" and "zhou"? The only difference I can feel is when your vocal cords turn on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plosive#Voice

> In fact, I'm inclined to think that there are actually two different sounds in English as well; "witch" and "Charlie" don't feel the same in my mouth.

There aren't.

> I think there are other romanizations where the 'q' sound is represented "tch".

Well, maybe; there are a large number of romanizations of Mandarin. But there are no significant romanizations where that is true. It's q in pinyin, ch' in Wade-Giles, and ts' or k' in postal romanization.

> How else would you describe the difference between "qu" and "ju", or "chou" and "zhou"? The only difference I can feel is when your vocal cords turn on.

You could read my other comment in the thread. qu and chou are aspirated; ju and zhou aren't. Your vocal cords don't turn on at different points for those syllables. Mandarin Chinese doesn't use voicing contrasts.

> I think we're using different definitions of "voiced". Other voiced / unvoiced pairs in English include g/k, b/p, v/f, z/s. See [1] for an "official" example of "voiced" being used the way I'm using it.

Yes, I know what voicing is. You don't seem to know what consonants are used in Mandarin.

Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Con... .

> qu and chou are aspirated; ju and zhou aren't. ...Compare [ref]

So the idea here is that chou and zhou are related in a similar way that the t's in "top" and "stop" are related: your mouth and vocal cords are doing the same thing, but in one case you have the puff of air and the other you don't.

At any rate, going back to the original question: the logic behind the choice is still consistent. On this classification, in Mandarin, p and t and ch are aspirated, and in English p and t and ch are voiceless; b and d and j and zh are unaspirated, and in English b and d and j and z are voiced. (And q is mainly thrown in to fill the gap, but its pronunciation in English is voiceless as well.)

Or, to explicitly quote from the ref you shared:

> Such pairs [of aspirated and unaspirated plosives and fricatives] are represented in the pinyin system mostly using letters which in Romance languages generally denote voiceless/voiced pairs (for example [p] and [b]).

Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction. In the former case unvoiced consonants often have aspirated allophones as in English, and in the latter case unaspirated consonants often have voiced allophones especially between vowels, as in Chinese or Korean. Hence why it makes sense to map the two in this manner - if your native language uses aspiration as the primary feature, and you hear someone who uses voicing, your brain will generally map it "automatically" for you, and their speech will sound weird but understandable.

(But then you get Hindi with a four-way distinction, both voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated in all possible combinations.)

> But then you get Hindi with a four-way distinction, both voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated in all possible combinations.

They're spelled that way; I don't think they're supposed to be pronounced that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Voiced_con...

>> True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to murmured (breathy-voice) consonants such as the [bʱ], [dʱ], [ɡʱ] that are common among the languages of India, are extremely rare.

> Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction.

My understanding is that all of these options are fairly common:

- two-way contrast between aspirated and unaspirated

- two-way contrast between voiced and voiceless

- three-way contrast between voiceless aspirated, voiceless, and voiced

- three-way contrast for labial and alveolar stops; two-way contrast for velar stops

> They're spelled that way; I don't think they're supposed to be pronounced that way.

True, but most languages don't distinguish between [h] and [ɦ] to begin with, with one often the allophone of the other. So listening to Hindi it sounds like the same thing, more or less.

> Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction.

Yes, that makes sense -- I certainly learned something from this conversation. It makes sense that speakers would naturally tend to classify things along different lines, and in Chinese the aspirated / unaspirated classification makes sense.

That said, after having had some time to sit with the proposition that 'j' in the English name "Joe" is voiced, and the "zh" in Chinese word "zhou" is unvoiced, it continues to seem obviously false to me. It seems very much to me like mistaking of the map for the territory [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

When you're listening to it, you are hearing the phone. That may well be voiced, even if the underlying phoneme is unvoiced.

To determine the true nature of the phoneme in a given language, you need to "flip the bit" on voicing (importantly: without adding/removing aspiration!) and see whether native speakers will treat it as different or not.

The article you linked to specifically says there are only voiceless plosives in Mandarin!

And, you'll notice I pointed out English voiced plosives. :-D

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