You do actually speak with your parents, right? Just tell them how it’s pronounced. They’ll get it right eventually, no matter how many x’s or q’s her name might have. After all, it’s their granddaughter we’re talking about.
But please leave out the extra spaces and extra capital letters: Huang Xuanni (or Huang Xuan-ni if you’re into copying the standard hyphenated style here even though it’s unnecessary).
If you decide to go with hanyu pinyin, let us know what happens. I’m curious if it would go through.
Join the hanyu pinyin revolution - living here, surrounded by it, with few errors (or changes to reflect regional dialects) is a delight. And I think a fairly large proportion of the population can read pinyin - in Shanghai anyway. I have a friend I SMS in pinyin if I am not at home. If I am at home I use the computer to send Chinese chacters.
I was asked to serve as the English editor for NTU’s “Studies in Chinese Literature” academic journal, which requires English abstracts for those articles that are accepted by the review panel. Being the only native English-speaking foreigner in the department, I was asked to edit the sometimes awful English abstracts. I noticed that each abstract used a different form of pinyin, and in reviewing old editions of the journal I found the same horrible trend. For those outside of Taiwan who are doing searches for articles based on key words, they will most likely be inputting Hanyu pinyin, which means all of those articles and great research in Taiwan would be unavailable to them. So, I told the “powers-that-be” about the problem and told them that if they wanted their research to be seen and accepted outside of Taiwan, they needed to accept reality. So, the NTU “Studies in Chinese Literature” journal now officially requires Hanyu pinyin for all romanization (including personal names) in its English abstracts.
The second victory was in my Research & Methodology grad class, I asked the professor to address the affect of Hanyu pinyin (the international standard) and the mess in Taiwan (Tongyong, MPS, bastardized Wade-Giles), etc. He lectured the class (and this is from an NTU professor, and NTU is most certainly “pro-Green”) on how Hanyu pinyin should always be used in academic articles because this is the international standard, and that all of the students should learn it if they want to be able to understand books/articles written by Western scholars of Sinology.
[quote]
MISSPELLED TAIPEI STREET SIGNS? TAIPEI GOVERNMENT IS LISTENING
Taipei, Dec. 9 (CNA) The Taipei City Government is asking the public to be on the lookout for incorrect Romanization of the names of roads, streets and alleyways around the city and to send in corrections.
Beginning Thursday until Dec. 31, the public can submit their observations of instances where spellings do not reflect the Hanyu Pinyin system of Romanization to the Department of Civil Affairs and the Taipei City Government. The errors will then be corrected.
Civil Affairs Department officials said that although all the English names of the city’s streets were changed from Tongyong to Pinyin several years ago, there are still many spelling errors.
Taking street names in the Shihlin district as examples, they said many signs need to be corrected.
Under the Pinyin system, “Shilin” is correct, whereas the district in Tongyong would read “ShihLin,” officials said.
Other examples included Bailing-BaiLing; Fuzhou-FuJhou; Fude-FuDe; Lanxing-LanSing; and Linxi-LinSi.
The public can send their corrections to the Civil Affairs Department via e-mail at: www.ca.taipei.gov.tw/civil/page.htm.
Those who offer suggestions will be entered in a lucky draw for prizes.
Taipei City is the only administrative area in Taiwan that uses Pinyin to spell the names of roads.
Nice to see some effort at improving consistency to a system of Romanization. But…hang on…
What!? A shelf life for incorrectness? Get in quick, boys and girls…
Which is all of them if you look at the silly capitalized middle syllable.
What?
So, you Tongyong zealots and anti-Ma fanatics, get emailing and let these guys know there are errors on every street corner, even if there are not.
Seriously though, why can’t they do this right and get a specialist in to do a proper job of it, regardless of time span? There are thousands of street signs, so what can a few emails achieve? From an administrative point of view this is pretty lame.
Although Taipei is still the only area that consistently uses Hanyu Pinyin, other places, including Taizhong and Xinzhu, have been applying it to their own signs.
There’s a degree of truth in this, as I noted in [url=Tongyong Pinyin for Taiwanese location names - #26 by cranky_laowai different thread[/url]. Under then-mayor Chen Shui-bian, Taipei began changing its street signs to a form of Tongyong Pinyin (one that used zh- and q-, BTW). A few signs went up here and there before Tongyong Pinyin was changed, which seemed to take some of the steam out of the initiative. :homer:
So at least on paper Taipei was using “Tongyong” (whatever that meant) when Ma came into office. But the situation of the signs themselves is that most remained in their original pre-Tongyong babel of bastardized Wade-Giles plus various mistakes.
Me, I want a replica street sign that says “Hanyu Pinyin Lu”.
Now if only both the President and Ma could do that, I would literally kiss them! (If they let me).
I only like Hanyu because I’d really hate to see the peculiar Qs, Xes and Zs go forever…[/quote]
Both of those links are old news and have already been discussed…
I’d be very happy to simply see some form of universal standardization. I personally like Han Yu pin yin as it would go on board ISO standards of 1982…
With Tsai English in power for more than 2 years now, has Tongyong Pinyin wiped out Hanyu Pinyin? As I’m not full time in Taiwan, I honestly would like to know.
I think the system now is leave it up for the people to decide. I think when choosing a way to romanize their names, most people, if aware of the choices, would pick WG instead of TY or HP.
Let’s pass the National Language Act first, then we can have a unified romanization for all native languages, which can then be used as Taiwan’s standard for romanizaing Hanji.
I doubt it will ever be unified. Simply not high enough of a priority for the government (regardless of which party is in power). How many Taiwan voters actually view this as a core issue?
They are still much against Hanyu Pinyin as a Communist invention -dunno who put taht in their heads- but they haven´t gone back to THAT mounstruosity. Machala! Machala!!!
