[Python-3000] pep 3131 again (original) (raw)

Giovanni Bajo rasky at develer.com
Fri May 18 01:22:07 CEST 2007

On 17/05/2007 11.23, Martin v. Löwis wrote:

Whether or not Japanese or Chinese people with no knowledge of English still can master the Latin alphabet easily, I don't know, as all Chinese people I do know speak German or English well.

All Chinese people are taught the Latin-character transliteration of Mandarin in school. It's called "pin-yin": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pin_yin. In fact, they use this Latin transliteration as the main mean to teach children how to pronounce each Chinese character.

This transliteration is so common that it is supported as an input method on devices like cellphones or keyboards (even though it is usually not the default: they have more specific and tuned input methods for computers and SMS).

So yes, Chinese people do master the Latin alphabet. And funnily enough for this thread, Pin-yin cannot be fully expressed in ASCII because it requires accented vowels (è, é, and many others I don't have handy).

Giovanni Bajo

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