pinyin (and wadegile) request has gotten derailed
Peter Constable
petercon at microsoft.com
Wed Sep 17 04:47:32 CEST 2008
From: ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no [mailto:ietf-languages-bounces at alvestrand.no] On Behalf Of Randy Presuhn
> Almost 20% of the possible syllables would be written differently, yet
> we'd end giving the same tag to materials in both Tongyong and
> Hanyu Pinyin orthographies?
IIRC, in dialect surveys conducted by SIL to support research on the Ethnologue, a 20% lexical dissimilarity is generally treated as likely indicating significant barriers to functional intelligibility. Lexical similarity is, I think, a good analogy for orthographic similarity, and so I suspect Randy has a very valid point.
Peter
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