Wade-Giles rant

[Shi Tong]

hahahaha I like it Lu! ;)

Well- Romanisation is not a problem per-se, after all, it's a Roman thing, and if it "works" in Italian and Polish, then that's great.

I just have a problem with poor Romanisation methods which end up with long complicated scrambled words with very little phonetic information. As I'm sure you all remembered, I still had trouble with pinyin until a short while ago and found it really hard to reconsile somtimes-- I still get confused about how to spell the mei in meiguanxi for example! :rolleyes:

Also, yes I think English spelling is annoying. Of course, it's ok for me because I grew up with it and there's not a lot I have trouble with...

[噴嚏疋]

I dont think you can use the "c doesn't sound like c" argument in translitteration, because no matter how close you can get using something "English", it still isn't ACTUALLY the sound.

Exactly. People are displeased by the "inaccurate" sounds represented by the romanization system, but it's because they have yet to grope the fact that they are romanization, not anglicization.

These systems (Pinyin, W-G and all the rest) use the Roman/Latin alphabet, not the English alphabet for their purpose. They're meant for use by all Latin alphabet users, not just the English speakers.

Although, W-G was clearly designed with Anglophones in mind, its inventors being British and all. While I understand why Wade chose not to use b and d, I really wished he did, since he wasted two perfectly beautiful letters by discarding 'em from an otherwise, to me, visually elegant system. I like Pinyin, but the q and x visually quite jarring and bizarrely exotic. One might even say that it's too...quixotic for many ;)

[kongli]

One of my professors once said "Romanization systems are like religion, you favor the on you grew up with."

I totally agree.