I apologize in advance as this is about as OT as you can get, but I've found a great diversity of backgrounds and languages on this list so I'm hoping someone might have more information on this for me as most of the stuff I've found through googling seems to be geared towards linguists and not casual users. So, getting onto the actual question. This all started with the search for the proper pronunciation of "chi". (As in life-force, etc.) Whether it's "che(eseburger)" or "key". In looking around, I've learned about Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Lessing-Othmer, EFEO, et al. romanizations. Unfortunately, I've learned a whole lot of nothing. I'm finding "chi" referred to as "qi" and as "chi" with no consensus on either pronunciation or spelling. I think a big part of the problem is that I'm finding a number of old English references done in the Yale style, which has very conflicting characters with Pinyin. So the first and easy question is, what's the story on ch/qi. And second, is there any easy way to tell which romanization is being used for a particular word in order to more easily figure out the pronunciation? (I'm guessing that it's "che(eseburger)" as "q" in Pinyin seems to be a ch and not a k sound. Also, any simpler references to more on the subject would be appreciated. I'm actually finding all of this very interesting. :) -- Alex Malinovich Support Free Software, delete your Windows partition TODAY! Encrypted mail preferred. You can get my public key from any of the pgp.net keyservers. Key ID: A6D24837
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