John Cowan cowan at
Mon Sep 8 20:51:52 CEST 2008

Randy Presuhn scripsit:

> The pinyin orthography is highly optimized for the phonology of Mandarin
> Chinese.  It would be terribly ill-suited for use with Vietnamese,
> English, German, French, and Russian, to name just a few languages
> for which the it lacks sufficient tone notation, vowel distinctions,
> stress markers, or consonants.

On examination,  Tibetan Pinyin is fairly closely related to Hanyu Pinyin:
it uses most of the same conventions (b = voiceless unaspirated labial
stop, e.g.) to form a practical Latin-script orthography for Tibetan, as
opposed to a transliteration of Tibetan script or ad hoc transcription.
But that certainly doesn't make it the same as Hanyu Pinyin.  It adds �
and � to the repertoire of letters, although it provides oi and ai as
alternative spellings; final -n represents nasalization, and final -r
represents vowel length.

> The registration request is for a specific orthography of a specific
> language, which happens to reflect that language's phonology rather
> well.


John Cowan  cowan at
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