About the legal status of Hanyu Pinyin after 2009-01-01:

Hello there…

Im a wikipedia contributor, and I have been suggesting that we switch to Hanyu Pinyin, when it comes to romanize chinese names: for instance, instead of talking about Jhongua Mingguo, we should talk about Zhonghua Mingguo… So far, my requests have been ignored…

The english media I have consulted says not much about Hanyu Pinyin… just the official announcement on september 2008 about the switch, and a december Taipei Times article about how foreigners r better in taiwan now that they find it easier to read chinese with Hanyu Pinyin as a help…

I assume most of u live in Taiwan…

  1. Has any official entity made any kind of announcement about the new Hanyu Pinyin? IN THIS NEW YEAR?

  2. IT IS OFFICIAL, RIGHT? another wiki contributor denied that Hanyu is official, I replied that since 01-01 it is official. I asked for his sources…

  3. To those who live outside Taibei, Jinmen and Xinzhu… (where Hanyu Pinyin is used) has any other city/county made any movement switching to Hanyu Pinyin?

  4. BTW… I assume Taipei will be moved to Taibei, web pages will be renamed, Kaoxiong to Gaoxiong…

  5. I’ve been reading some of ur posts regarding students that bastardize every romanization system… well unless Hanyu Pinyin is taught at schools, we will be seeing bastardizations for a long time to come… Has any GMD (KMT) legislator made a call for such a move?

  6. Will Chungwha Post be moved to Zhonghua post? And about Chunhwa Telecom to Zhonghua Telecom?

I dunno if any of u has been to China, but some chinese publications I use also bastardize pinyin… (NOT TEACHING MATERIALS, THOSE R QUITE WELL…)

Please try to answer this 6 questions…

I translate for the GIO, and this is our directive:

Everything shall be in Hanyu Pinyin, except for names of Counties and Municipalities. If we exclude the ones in which the officially adopted spellings are already the same as Hanyu Pinyin (like Yilan, Miaoli and Yunlin), we are left with the following which shall retain their long-accepted spellings:

Taipei
Hsinchu
Taichung
Changhua
Keelung
[color=#000040]Ch[/color]iayi
Kaohsiung
Ping[color=#000040]t[/color]ung
Tait[color=#000040]u[/color]ng
Huali[color=#000040]e[/color]n
Kinmen
Lienchiang

I suggest a purging of Tongyong names from Wikipedia, but preserving the names of Taipei, Kaohsiung, Hsinchu, etc. with the names by which they are officially known.

Dear Humuguhua,

I agree with Chris. I must add, though, that even though it is a government initiative, even the government agencies are waiting for the Ministry of Education’s guidelines. They will publish a “Bible” which we are supposed to follow. Once we have that as a clear policy, we have a marker to follow.

Hence, this New Year no “official” announcement on this regard has been made, as it has already been done before, and the “Bible” has not been published yet.

As to usage in other counties, it is a bit of a hot potato:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2009/01/03/2003432775

As Chris said, in general terms, we must use Hanyu Pinyin, but there are certain exceptions, as Chris has pointed out, regarding traditional usage of names -say, Taipei instead of Taibei, Chunghwa Telecom, etc…

Same with names, especially of government officials. Basically, they can spell their names as they like, so you have to go to every agencies website/call their offices and verify their names.

Again, this is for government agencies usage.

Now, if I can convince my coworkers that Wikipedia is following our guideline instead of the other way around…

I wouldn’t have thought it would matter in terms of Wikipedia. Does anyone REALLY use that as a definitive source? Surely not! :astonished:
I use it to look stuff up simply because its often near the top of the page in a google search. Sure, I’ll look at it, but I would NEVER use information taken from Wikipedia without cross-referencing with a more reputable source.

Sigh

[quote=“sandman”]I wouldn’t have thought it would matter in terms of Wikipedia. Does anyone REALLY use that as a definitive source? Surely not! :astonished:
I use it to look stuff up simply because its often near the top of the page in a google search. Sure, I’ll look at it, but I would NEVER use information taken from Wikipedia without cross-referencing with a more reputable source.[/quote]
Same here, but then I’ll correct the info in the Wikipedia article (if needed) and add the source.

[quote=“Icon”]As Chris said, in general terms, we must use Hanyu Pinyin, but there are certain exceptions, as Chris has pointed out, regarding traditional usage of names -say, Taipei instead of Taibei, Chunghwa Telecom, etc…

Same with names, especially of government officials. Basically, they can spell their names as they like, so you have to go to every agencies website/call their offices and verify their names.

Again, this is for government agencies usage.

Now, if I can convince my coworkers that Wikipedia is following our guideline instead of the other way around…[/quote]
I would add that the statement I made above applies only to place names. As for personal names, we go according to what they have chosen for themselves (e.g. what is on their business card, passport, etc.) So Ma Ying-jeou will still be Ma Ying-jeou, not Ma Yingjiu. Same with businesses: Hsin Tung Yang is not to be spelled Xindongyang.

In a directive from another government agency some time ago (before Tongyong) we were asked to use C h i a y i, H u a l i e n, P i n g t u n g, T a i t u n g plus those names in your list and use the new spelling (第二式) for all other place names. When we switched to Tongyong later, the same rule applied. So it seems the selection of names to keep in their commonly used form is a rather random one. :ponder:

or did the spelling Nazi of this board switched some of your place names? … :unamused:

Seems the Spelling Nazi changed the spellings for Pingtung, etc., but for some reason I see the changes only in your response, not on my original post. :idunno:

In other words, with the exception of Keelung and Kinmen, they are all Wade-Giles spellings without apostrophes.

Next Wednesday’s meeting of the Executive Yuan’s 雙語詞彙翻譯審查小組 will review the conversion from Tongyong to Hanyu of the official English names of local government entities.

So 連江 County will still be spelled in two different ways: Lianjiang for the main part, which is governed by the PRC, and Lienchiang for the few islands that are governed by the ROC. Silly - though not as silly as those Tongyongised Taiwan history books that talk about the “Cing Dynasty.”

Also, do we assume that where counties have within them cities of the same name, such as Taidong/Tai[color=#004040]t[/color]ung, the cities still have to be spelled in Wade-Giles to match the county?

Note, my “location” (see left) has been, is and will be spelled Taibei City, to match Beitou, Zhubei, Beipu and the dozens of other “bei” placenames in Taiwan, not to mention the mainland.

I just read the Taibei Times article about southern DPP counties… It seems we will se a lot of infighting over the romanization system (but there r local elections next year, and maybe the GMD wins over some DPP strongholds… who knows?

So, Ill just wait to the wednesday executive yuan meeting… hope to receive some clearer instructions…

Personally, I dont agree with retaining Taipei or Kaoxiong (I dont even know how to write Gaoxiong in WG), its just much easier to use JUST ONE romanization system… If the government is gonna make the effort to change the romanization nationwide, y to make exceptions?

Does anyone know, or have means to know, of how much money r we talking about?

events in which Tongyong Pinyin (通用拼音) can be used being the competence of local governments: I can think about county road signage, the local city hall, tourism sites, foreigners related sites,

Hi there Icon… in the site (AND I AGREE WITH THOSE WHO DONT CONSIDER IT A RELIABLE SOURCE, UNLESS GOOD SOURCES R GIVEN, WHICH IS WHAT I TRY TO DO WHEN I DO SOME EDITING) there is a long debate over the convenience of using just Hanyu Pinyin to romanize names, and Im pushing for such a move, but, still, I need some official guidelines implemented in the ROC to have a basis to make such a movement…

Seriously? Do you live in Taiwan? It’s on all the road signs.

As a ‘foreigner’, I will never understand the big deal the politically minded of Taiwan make about it. I can’t remember a single situation were I was ever confused or disadvantaged by inconsistent transliteration systems. It’s just not really that confusing.

Taiwan doesn’t have real problems to waste time and money on?

I oppose the change of major cities like Taipei and Kaohsiung is because they have been known by these names for decades. Likewise, I opposed the change of Bombay to Mumbai, Burma to Myanmar, and Calcuta to Kolkata, and would oppose a change of Bangkok to Krungthep, Rome to Roma or Munich to Munchen, even though the latter in each case is more accurate.

If the purpose of romanisation/transliteration is to aid people who cannot read the script, then some awareness of what is useful for those people would be desirable. The Taiwan pinyin dramas have nothing to do with being ‘useful’. What use is ‘Zhongshan Road’ to a non Chinese speaking visitor? Do they get a a cab and say ‘zong shan road’? What’s missing there are the ability to pronounce the ‘zh’ phoneme, the word for ‘road’ in Chinese and tone marks. Whether you write ‘zh’, ‘jh’ or ‘ch’ is immaterial to someone such as a business traveller who has no knowledge of Chinese.

The question of consistency is also a white elephant. Is an adult of normal intelligence seriously going to be foxed by a spelling change from ‘ch’ to ‘zh’, on a straight road?

It’s just political nonsense, I don’t believe that anyone is seriously confused by Gaoxiong/Kaoshiung.

My POV doesnt really matter… Its just that, a POV

[quote=“Buttercup”]As a ‘foreigner’, I will never understand the big deal the politically minded of Taiwan make about it. I can’t remember a single situation were I was ever confused or disadvantaged by inconsistent transliteration systems. It’s just not really that confusing.

Taiwan doesn’t have real problems to waste time and money on?[/quote]If you ever come back to Taiwan you can go the the Mandarin Training Centre (yes, I know it changed its name years ago, but I’ve forgotten what it changed to) at Shi-Da and have a look in the students’ letter drawers. When I was studying there, and later when I worked nearby, I took it upon myself to go through the drawers once a week picking out all the letters that were in the wrong place. Not only were letters in the wrong drawers - many were for teachers, or for other departments in NTNU, or for other universities. Also among them were random letters from abroad that the post office couldn’t figure out so they sent them to the MTC (as was) on the off-chance that someone might know who they were for. That is what you get when there is no consistent spelling for placenames. Remember, on top of the multiple spellings you have misspellings, like my mother who always writes Chende Road instead of Chengde, and then scribbly handwriting, plus the fact that most people seem averse to using the post code. Then you end up with what I saw once - a letter for a Filipino worker somewhere in Taibei County that was gathering dust on a shelf in someone’s home in Taibei City - a letter that was telling the worker that someone in his family was deceased. And I have seen lots of misdelivered letters like that. Yes, consistent spelling is very important for the Post Office and courier companies, and for the people who want and need to recieve letters and parcels, and receive them in good time.

[quote=“hugumuhua”]I just read the Taibei Times article…[/quote] :bravo: Yesss. That’s what I like to see :thumbsup:

Heh. My mom always writes Huquian Street instead of Huqian Street. :stuck_out_tongue:

:laughing: I got a letter from my father, six months after he died. The address was of a street without any ‘confusing’ pinyin; stuff just gets … lost. A uniform pinyin system will not make postmen more able to read addresses without characters. Well, I don’t know; I’m no expert. They could try it and see if it brings any of the benefits touted, I suppose.