Quote
Berrjod
with n/l there's the additional argument that some people do make the distinction.
And this is precisely the strongest argument for differentiating 'n' and 'l' orthographically. To briefly return to my previous analogy, there are numerous English speakers who still distinguish 'wh' from 'w', and who is to say that they are incorrect simply because they are now in the minority? Most native Cantonese speakers with whom I've consulted support maintaining the N/L distinction in Romanised Cantonese, despite the fact that they do not differentiate them in their own speech. Part of the reason is likely that, as I had touched upon earlier, this distinction makes it easier to type in Chinese (including colloquial Cantonese) because it mitigates the ambiguity created by homophones.