Pinyin

[John Cowan]

Peter Constable scripsit:

> Isn't that ignoring the politics of the region? By analogy, suppose
> Hindi orthography were a perfectly sufficient basis for transliterating
> Tamil: that wouldn't mean that Tamil speakers would have no objections
> to tagging their transliterated content "ta-hindi". Maybe "pinyin"
> isn't a problem for speakers of other languages, but I wouldn't want
> to assume that without investigation.

In the case of the Chinese government vs. the minority languags, quantity
has a quality all its own.  These official romanizations may lack many
things, but they don't lack officialness.

-- 
So they play that [tune] on                     John Cowan
their fascist banjos, eh?                       cowan at ccil.org
        --Great-Souled Sam                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan