Linguistic Miscellany Thread

[bradrn]

OTOH, there might be deeper patterns if you have the right phonemicization... and Mandarin vowels are not that. Norman offers a phonemic analysis which you might play with; FWIW he thinks Mandarin has no /o/.

Ah, good point. I’m rather fond of the two-vowel analysis myself, but I’ll check out Norman’s too.

[zompist]

OTOH, there might be deeper patterns if you have the right phonemicization... and Mandarin vowels are not that. Norman offers a phonemic analysis which you might play with; FWIW he thinks Mandarin has no /o/.

Ah, good point. I’m rather fond of the two-vowel analysis myself, but I’ll check out Norman’s too.

Oops, I got a thinko above-- I meant that pinyin is not a good phonemicization of Mandarin vowels.

[bradrn]

OTOH, there might be deeper patterns if you have the right phonemicization... and Mandarin vowels are not that. Norman offers a phonemic analysis which you might play with; FWIW he thinks Mandarin has no /o/.

Ah, good point. I’m rather fond of the two-vowel analysis myself, but I’ll check out Norman’s too.

Oops, I got a thinko above-- I meant that pinyin is not a good phonemicization of Mandarin vowels.

Luckily I understood that anyway!

[bradrn]

Well, I just realised that the code I’m working from uses rhymes which aren’t in Pinyin at all (e.g. -ueng). They all get simplified down to valid Pinyin in the end, but it seems a pointlessly complicated way of going about things (though that’s quite in keeping with the rest of the code, mind you). I’m not convinced it’s a good use of my time trying to decode all this.