NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: Mid XIX century? Nav
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2005 Nov 22, 02:40 EST
From: Frank Reed CT
Date: 2005 Nov 22, 02:40 EST
Fred, you wrote: "Chinese and Japanese are also tonal languages, which cannot be conveyed by our alphabet." To represent (putonghua) Chinese with the western alphabet requires only four little accent markers to accomodate those tones. You are correct that these are technically additions to the alphabet, but it's really not difficult. In theory, that is. The process of *learning* these tones can be arduous, but writing them and recognizing them in print is easy and an accurate representation of the spoken language --so accurate that these systems are used and taught by many Chinese people. By contrast, the Chinese written language carries almost no information about pronunciation. Japanese, by the way, is not tonal, and it can be written very easily with a subset of the western alphabet. Sorry for being off-topic. -FER 42.0N 87.7W, or 41.4N 72.1W. www.HistoricalAtlas.com/lunars
