Quote
Changgi
It used to be one when it was first introduced, yes. So you're just going to call English Romanization and not English writing, or whatever? It is not one any more because it is not some sort of phonetic transcription of the modern sounds.
We're just going to have to disagree on this. My opinion is as follows:
Once a Romanisation, always a Romanisation
The fact that the letters used in the English language were designed for Latin–and by extension, the modern Romance languages–solidifies this principle for me. No amount of time will render this alphabet native to a Germanic language; its origin is permanent and well documented. If Latin had simply adopted the Greek alphabet, I would have said that written Latin is actually a Grecofied script. If I could have altered the course of history, I'd have created a unique alphabet for the Germanic languages, wherein Latin letters would be adopted for perfectly corresponding sounds, while entirely new letters would be created for Germanic sounds not represented by any Latin letter.
Quote
Changgi
On the conflation, I actually pronounce "your" and "you're" differently but I'm not sure about others. /jɔr/ and /jʊ(ə)r/ respectively.
That's a fair example, but in this case, I think that it's more about one's own accent. I personally choose to differentiate them because I almost always favour the differentiation of potential homophones (except where such a differentiation is not historically justified, such as that of the high-level and high-falling Cantonese tones). For instance, it might sound crazy, but I still pronounce the [微] initial in Mandarin as /ʋ/ (e.g. 中文 as /tʂʊŋ ʋən/), and I am never misunderstood or corrected when I do so; indeed some native Mandarin speakers still make this distinction, and it is today attributed to 'accent' or 'dialect' (depending on which is appropriate given the circumstance).
Quote
Changgi
This is apparently more of a special thing. Those people are likely not aware of the n/l distinction (as with most people here) but when singing our teachers specifically tell us to sing 你 as "nei5" on the grounds that "it is actually pronounced that way". So that is something people specifically do after training, rather than being a formal/informal distinction.
My music teacher in primary school insisted that we mustn't pronounce the phoneme 'r' as a syllable-coda while singing, even though we all spoke a rhotic dialect of English natively. It's just one of those formalities I guess, and in this case, it sounds better to drop the terminal 'r' sounds (less filtered vocal timbre). As far as Cantonese poetry and music is concerned, however, the 'n' initial is likely strictly preserved because it belongs to a completely different classical phonemic category than does 'l'. Some Cantonese speakers merge the 'p' and 't' codas in conversation as well, but this conflation would ruin the rhyming consistency of many songs and poems.