From: Stephen Hodge Message: 6319 Date: 2005-01-28
Dear Joanna,
Thus as Ong Teng Kee says, "no mandarin words for to, tho or hutva, tvam,
even [though] we use many chinese dialects together in one book", and many
other sounds.
What you must remember is that the various languages of the world have
different sets of phonemes represented by their scripts (if they have one).
Some languages are very rich in sounds such as the several Bushman languages
like Khoisan with 191 phonemes and !Xu with 92. At the other extreme, you
have languages like Hawaiian with only 8 consonants and 5 vowels or Rotokas
with 6 just 6 consonants and 5 vowels. There are other languages with just
two vowels !
This means that it is often not possible to transcribe Pali into anything
but the standard romanization -- which the prospective user must learn to
pronounce as best as they can. The exception would be the various South
Asian scripts because they were designed for the Indic sound systems.
Best wishes,
Stephen Hodge
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