The "strangeness" of pinyin sounds to English-speakers' ears is because, as someone earlier mentioned, pinyin was developed with the assistance of Soviet linguists. While it does use a roman alphabet, sounds, especially the "c" are based on cyrillic sounds. "Tsar/Czar" illustrates it.. in Russian, Ts and Cz are the same letter: ц. That resulted in the "roman" letter of "c," it could have just as easily become "t" in pinyin. Pinyin frustrates me to no end, of course, I am a super-newbie. I can read Cyrillic so I can understand the sounds of pinyin -- but I would much prefer pinyin to actually be based on cyrillic because at least I wouldn't be making my constant mistake of applying English phonetics to pinyin letters. With Cyrillic, at least, there's no confusion. ц = "ts" instead of thinking "c" means the "k" sound as our English backgrounds have ingrained upon us. If I can get my pinyin irritation under control, I suspect my learning will be much more efficient!
Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin
December 17, 2009 at 9:51 AMThe "strangeness" of pinyin sounds to English-speakers' ears is because, as someone earlier mentioned, pinyin was developed with the assistance of Soviet linguists. While it does use a roman alphabet, sounds, especially the "c" are based on cyrillic sounds. "Tsar/Czar" illustrates it.. in Russian, Ts and Cz are the same letter: ц. That resulted in the "roman" letter of "c," it could have just as easily become "t" in pinyin. Pinyin frustrates me to no end, of course, I am a super-newbie. I can read Cyrillic so I can understand the sounds of pinyin -- but I would much prefer pinyin to actually be based on cyrillic because at least I wouldn't be making my constant mistake of applying English phonetics to pinyin letters. With Cyrillic, at least, there's no confusion. ц = "ts" instead of thinking "c" means the "k" sound as our English backgrounds have ingrained upon us. If I can get my pinyin irritation under control, I suspect my learning will be much more efficient!