Проблемы китайского и общего языкознания. К 90-летию С. Е. Яхонтова

 636  Hana Třísková   describable. This is due to the simplicity of the Mandarin syllable structure, the restricted inventories of segments allowed in particular positions (a mere four phonemes being allowed in more than one position) and clear phono- tactic rules. Furthermore, this phenomenon runs literally through the whole inventory of Mandarin syllables and, therefore, it is definitely worth our at- tention. Pīnyīn and the traps of its orthography The Chinese character script, by its very nature, cannot serve as a guide to pronunciation. This is the task of the Pīnyīn spelling system (the official name is Hàny Pīnyīn f ng’àn 汉语拼音方案 ). It was created for the nota- tion of the sound form of standard Mandarin — or, strictly speaking, ini- tially just for the notation of the standard readings of characters ( Pīnyīn was approved back in 1958). Pīnyīn , after considering various other solutions, was eventually conceived as a romanization system: it uses the letters of the Latin alphabet. This is undoubtedly a great advantage for a Western learner of Mandarin. Note that in the process of designing a new phonetic alpha- bet after 1949, it was suggested that the Cyrilic or even the newly designed graphemes inspired by the strokes of Chinese characters could be used — cf. the Zhùyīn zìm system, which was conceived in 1913 (this system was not purely alphabetic, though; see below). In an alphabetic script such as the Latin script, ideally one letter should rep- resent one speech sound — either a vowel, or a consonant. In fact, there need not be (and hardly ever is) a consistent one-to-one correspondence between the graphemes of the script and the phonemes of the language, or between the graphemes of a script and the particular sounds of the language. The degree to which the written form of a language reflects its phonological system or its actual sounds depends on the orthographic rules of the language in question. Since the sound systems of languages which use the Latin alphabet differ, the concrete ways in which these languages employ Latin letters are wide-ranging (including the use of modifications such as various digraphs, diacritical marks etc.). The divergences among the orthographies of various languages regularly cause trouble for the students of foreign languages, especially at the beginning of their studies: adult learners of a foreign language are to a large extent at the mercy of its written form. Pīnyīn orthography, having been designed by lin- guists on a green field, is fortunately much simpler than, for example, English orthography, which, for various historical reasons, is very complex and often inconsistent. Even so, Pīnyīn orthography has its own pitfalls.