Talk:ZH

Transliteration and pinyin

The bullet item for Zh (digraph) parenthetically mentioned transliteration of "languages such as Russian", along with the pinyin romanization of (Mandarin) Chinese. These situations are not directly comparable, and the sounds represented ([tʂ] in pinyin, [ʒ] in transliterated Russian etc.) are totally different.

Pinyin is a strictly structured romanization system, used officially by the Chinese government, and [tʂ] is a basic phoneme of Mandarin. But while English has the sound [ʒ] (e.g. in pleasure and luxurious), it is never word-initial and is not frequent in any case. And since English has no distinct spelling for it, "zh" is most commonly used to represent it as the voiced counterpart of "sh":

zh : sh :: [ʒ] : [ʃ]

::

z : s :: [z] : [s]

I have modified the paragraph accordingly. --Thnidu (talk) 21:06, 10 June 2012 (UTC)