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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Chinese<==>English transliteration
Message-ID: <402@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 22-Sep-83 19:33:58 EDT
Article-I.D.: dciem.402
Posted: Thu Sep 22 19:33:58 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 23-Sep-83 01:29:53 EDT
References: <663@grkermit.UUCP>
Organization: D.C.I.E.M, Toronto, Canada
Lines: 20

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What I'm looking for is some kind of a guide indicating what letters in
the transcriptions correspond to what sounds. Does anyone know what the
correspondence is?
==============================

Usually there is no one-to-one correspondence between the sounds of
two languages. The only reasonably accurate way to do a transcription
is to use the International Phonetic Alphabet, and this doesn't really
help unless the reader already has a pretty good idea of what the
language sounds like. As for Chinese, the tones have to be included
to give even a chance of having an intelligible transcription. That's
pretty hard using English alphabetic characters. Just pronounce the
words as seems reasonable to you, and they will probably seem reasonable
to your (English-speaking) listener. If you are more concerned to get
them near the original sounds, there exist some lists of approximations,
but I don't know where to find them. But why worry? How do you
pronounce Pontefract or Cockburnspath? (Hint: try "pumfry" and "coepth").

Martin Taylor