Re: Lu/Lü/Liu

[David Marjanovic <david.marjanovic@gmx.at>]

Original Message by Nick Pharris Friday, 8. November 2002 21:50 
> Quoting "Jaime A. Headden" <qilongia@yahoo.com>:
> > <10) The paper by Junchang Lui,>
> >
> >   Lü -- I have the paper before me. [...]
>
> I am aware that "Lu" and "Lü" are different.  My question is, is "Liu"
> merely the pinyin transcription for "Lü", or are these distinct as well?

Liu is distinct from Lu and Lü. All three are Pinyin. Lui does not exist.

Ü is rare in Pinyin because most consonants allow only either u or ü after 
themselves. Only n and l allow both, and only after them are the dots 
written. Why? Maybe it's because of the diacritics that are used for the 
tones. You have to cram them into the limited space on top of the ü dots. 
This way you have to do that less often. But then nobody writes the 
diacritics anyway, like nobody wrote the superscript numbers in Wade-Giles.
        Wade-Giles had e. g. Yüen for what is today Yuan. Junchang would 
probably be 
Chün-ch'ang in Wade-Giles.

Thanks to HP Andrea Kirk -- maybe I'd better say that the English parts of 
Vertebrata PalAsiatica do what I wrote. In the Chinese parts the 2 Japanese 
names I've seen so far are written as 4 Chinese characters each, must be some 
sort of wholesale translation... ~:-|