Hi all-
I would disagree with "Bopomofo is roughly equivalent to hiragana"--
1) Hiragana is part of the Japanese written language, whereas Bopomofo
is
not part of Chinese written language--Bopomofo is an aid for
pronunciation,
used primarily for educating children or for computer input in Taiwan;
2) Bopomofo is alphabetic, whereas Hiragana is syllabic (i.e.
Bopomofo (albeit inconsistently) represent consonant/vowel sounds,
whereas Hiragana represent the pronunciation of an entire syllable).
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: Autrijus Tang [mailto:autrijus(_at_)autrijus(_dot_)org]
Sent: 2002年3月20日 下午 6:49
To: Dan Kogai
Cc: Larry Wall; Jean-Michel Hiver; Anton Tagunov;
perl-unicode(_at_)perl(_dot_)org
Subject: Re: No phonetic scripts and still happy?
On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 03:24:34AM +0900, Dan Kogai wrote:
: Not as far as I know. Hiragana / Katakana is exclusively
a Japanese
: thing ain't it?
Yes. Bopomofo is the Chinese equivalent.
Not quite. Bopomofo is more like international phonetic
symobols; use
in education but not in real life. And even that seems to
have been
replaced with Roman equivalent of Ping Ying.
Bopomofo is roughly equivalent to hiragana; i.e. it's used to
spell out
Chinese characters, and is the dominant input method in Taiwan.
Although there are plans to ditch BPMF in favor to Hanyu
Pinyin, the vast
majority of Taiwanese people still learns Chinese via
Bopomofo, and the
usage in online communication is considered c00l and 3133t. That is,
frown upon by some senior netizens, but is part of life anyway.
/Autrijus/
