BOOK REVIEWS
179
In my opinion much of the earlier discussion tends to be more an aesthetic exercise, a presentation of personal standards of elegance. Most if not all of the proposed systems work and do their job well enough. Most of the counterproposals were made with such goals as simplification, economies at the printers, or the revelation of linguistic truths in the analysis. These, and a number of other goals, are of course valid and important, but the combination of these goals and the possible differing priorities in achieving them creates literally an infinite number of possible transcription systems, most of them basically acceptable. The first requirement is essentially linguistic and says in over-simplified terms that the system should be non-redundant and unambiguous. If carried to its logical extreme this would generally produce systems satisfying only to linguists, systems in which the minimum inventory of symbols is used to transcribe all the contrasting sounds of Chinese. The trouble with such systems is that they often disturb everyone else in the field by forcing them to learn too many rules to cover situations in which a given symbol may have multiple pronunciations conditioned by the preceding or following symbols. For example, in the Pinyin system now preferred by Peking, the letter u is pronounced [u] or [ü] depending on whether it follows j- or zh- respectively.
This sort of thing takes care of a perfectly good linguistic fact about the language, but to the average reader or beginning student it is irritating and troublesome to find one letter with two contrasting pronunciations. The effect is generally more confusing than helpful. Therefore, although leaving something to be desired by the linguist, the more popular systems usually work on a principle of one symbol for one sound and ignore the details of linguistic complementary distribution. But the arguments still flare up about the desirability of such an approach, or even about the choice of symbols in cases where multiple choices seem possible to the disputants. No less a figure than Bernhard Karlgren ("Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese", Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 26, 367) has implied that the reason English and American speakers have so much trouble pronouncing words like 'self' and 'master' is because Wade-Giles spells them tzŭ and chu respectively, whereas in fact the initial consonants of these words are of two quite different values. He argues that the transcription has ignored the complementary distribution between velar and retroflex initials, and he uses a system which
BOOK REVIEWS
179
In my opinion much of the earlier discussion tends to be more an aesthetic exercise, a presentation of personal standards of elegance. Most if not all of the proposed systems work and do their job well enough. Most of the counterproposals were made with such goals as simplification, economies at the printers, or the revelation of linguistic truths in the analysis. These, and a number of other goals, are of course valid and important, but the combination of these goals and the possible differing priorities in achieving them creates literally an infinite number of possible transcription systems, most of them basically acceptable. The first requirement is essentially linguistic and says in over-simplified terms that the system should be non-redundant and unambiguous. If carried to its logical ex- treme this would generally produce systems satisfying only to ling- uists, systems in which the minimum inventory of symbols is used to transcribe all the contrasting sounds of Chinese. The trouble with such systems is that they often disturb everyone else in the field by forcing them to learn too many rules to cover situations in which a given symbol may have multiple pronunciations conditioned by the preceding or following symbols. For example, in the Pinyin system now preferred by Peking, the letter u is pronounced [u] or [ü] depending on whether it follows j- or zh-respectively.
This sort of thing takes care of a perfectly good linguistic fact about the language, but to the average reader or beginning student it is irritating and troublesome to find one letter with two contrast- ing pronunciations. The effect is generally more confusing than helpful. Therefore, although leaving something to be desired by the linguist, the more popular systems usually work on a principle of one symbol for one sound and ignore the details of linguistic complementary distribution. But the arguments still flare up about the desirability of such an approach, or even about the choice of symbols in cases where multiple choices seem possible to the dispu- tants. No less a figure than Bernhard Karlgren ("Compendium of Phonetics in Ancient and Archaic Chinese', Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities 26, 367) has implied that the reason English and American speakers have so much trouble pronouncing words like 'self' and 'master' is because Wade-Giles spells them chỉ and chu respectively, whereas in fact the initial conson- ants of these words are of two quite different values. He argues that the transcription has ignored the complementary distribution between velar and retroflex initials, and he uses a system which
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