% Mnemonic can work quite well for Han characters, provided you have the
% right mnemonics....
I don't believe it. I'll wait and see.
% The Japanese have a romaji transcription of Kanji into hiragana and
% latin (at least the other way :-), and the Chinese have a romanisation
% of their Hanzi characters -
% pinguin (sp?) and using things like that may be quite useful.
% It is a big job to do this naming and I do not myself have the expertise,
% but I actually am working together with somebody who has the knowledge,
% and we are about to have something ready on mnemonics for Han.
Not a solution !
Each dialect of Chinese (there are hundreds that are commonly used
today and there ARE differences between "Mandarin" in the PRC and
elsewhere) pronounces characters differently. There is no 1-1 mapping
between romanisation and a character that will solve the problem in a
manner truly mnemonic. Moreover, most people who use Chinese cannot
read romanisation because there are more than 20 different,
incompatible romanisations. Note also that in Mandarin Chinese there
are only about 300 word-sounds to cover tens of thousands of characters.
This means that there are so many homonyms that a 1-1 mapping between
the romanisation of the pronunciation and the character itself will
NEVER be possible for the dialect used in the most localities (nor for
any other commonly used dialect). Your proposal does not provide
equivalent functionality to the mnemonic encoding of european
languages, shows ignorance of Asian linguistics generally, and is not
generally useful because even if these other problems were solved (as
might be conceivable for some other language family than Chinese) it
would still require a lookup table to be consulted by most users.
Mark Crispin has already spoken to the likelihood of Japanese finding
any Gwai Lo romanisation useful. I see no point in repeating his remarks
since I agree.
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil