You’ve seen her passport? What are you, a customs agent?
Once again, Hobart, you really should try a little harder to get things right before you lecture others on how things ought to be. “Li Deng Hui” would not be the correct way to write the former president’s name in Hanyu Pinyin. It would be Li Denghui. And Lee Teng-hui, not Lee Teng Hui, is the traditional way his name has been spelled. And Li Teng-hui would be the correct way to spell it under the Wade-Giles system generally used before. So much for standards.
At least people might stop saying “Li tongue hui.” Preserve poor systems and irregularities forever, no matter the cost. Got it. But personal names are really a separate matter.
Damn those commie linguists for coming up with a rational and effective romanization system! But no matter: we’ll just have an ethnologist ideologue invent a poor system we can use instead. That way people who have been hiding under rocks for the last century or so and therefore haven’t heard anything about Taiwan’s de facto independence from China can study Mandarin and then come to Taiwan and see how things are romanized here and then go to China and then see how things are romanized there and then notice that the systems are different and then think that, oh, Taiwan and China must be different. “Thank God for those street signs, otherwise I never would have noticed! Now to get my bags packed for Singapore, which I’d mistakenly thought was an indendent country but now I realize is part of China. Thank you tongyong pinyin!”
Just exactly how many people on the planet do you think this is going to cover? Here’s my estimate: none.
[quote=“Juba”]
ai hav desAIded tu diferEnshieit maisElf from iuu es and brItish impIIrializm bai iUUzing a dIferent spEling sIstem for Inglish. Nout mai sIstem iz supIIrior bikOz it shouz witsh sIlabl iz strest. nou mor wOOmangering kApitalist spEling for mii![/quote]
LOL!
Hanyu pinyin may not be better, but it’s a global standard. It was not devised by the Chinese, but by the Russians - who did an excellent job in my view.
I just went through all these threads and put together all the reasons I see in them, plus a couple of my own, for adopting Hanyu Pinyin rather than Tongyong Pinyin. It makes me wonder how people can say that it doesn’t matter which system is used:
Using Hanyu Pinyin makes it easier for checking things on the internet, including things about Taiwan;
It makes it easier for foreign companies to do business here (using a new system just creates costs in terms of time and money);
It makes it easier for tourists, especially those who have spent a bit of time in Singapore, China or Hong Kong, or who took a Chinese class in college, to get around the island. Especially if they spend time in Taipei City, which uses Hanyu Pinyin, and then go outside it to run into signs in Tongyong Pinyin.
Thus, in terms of attracting investment and tourists, and getting Taiwan better known in the world, it makes sense to use Hanyu Pinyin.
It makes it easier for tourists, especially those who have spent a bit of time in Singapore, China or Hong Kong, or who took a Chinese class in college, to get around the island. Especially if they spend time in Taipei City, which uses Hanyu Pinyin, and then go outside it to run into signs in Tongyong (痛用) Pinyin.[/quote]
As someone who studied Mandarin for a year at university before coming to Taiwan, and spent over two hours looking for “he-sin yee” road while unknowingly being just a block away on “jen-ai” road and puzzling the locals and further being unable to read the characters (if I had paid attention in school and had the vocabulary build-up to do so) because I had learned simplified characters to boot, I certainly would have appreciated the Hanyu Pinyin during my first week here. Nevermind getting lost looking for a place on what sounded like “ba de lu” and read as “Pa Teh Road” on (some of) the road signs later that week.
have notice that they have changed the romanization of the train station from Chungli to Jhongli. since the change, newbies are pronouncing the name more authentically than in the past. although most of my chinese training back home was pinyin, i must concede that the taiwan spelling in this case is far more accurate.
You’re missing the point. All pinyin systems are pronounced exactly the same. And because Mandarin contains several sounds that English does not have, no pinyin system can be 100% intuitive. And even supposing Tongyong pinyin (No such thing as Taiwan spelling as Yu Boquan does not represent Taiwan) is in a few instances “better” than Wade-Giles or Gooey Romatzyh, I can point out a kazillion inconsistencies and non-intuitive pronunciations in Tongyong pinyin. The undeniable truth of the matter is that there are no printed materials using Tongyong, and it is completely unrecognized internationally. You might as well ask the French to forego the Metric system and use the Imperial system of measures. You’re not going to convince anyone who has studied the issue.
Back during the Cultural Revolution, it was decided that since [color=red]red[/color] is progressive, traffic lights should be changed. Yes, you guessed it, [color=red]Red[/color] for Go and [color=green]Green[/color] for Stop.
At the risk of driving this further off topic, the version I have heard from numerous sources is that that idea was proposed by red guards but nixed by the government - specifically, by Zhou Enlai.
(Zhou Enlai Tongzhi Zai Shoudu Hongweibing Zuotanhui Shang de Jianghua = Comrade Zhou Enlai’s Talk at the Red Guard’s Forum in the Capital City.)
(It would have been harder for me to find that quote if I didn’t know the Hanyu pinyin spelling of Zhou Enlai. Wade-Giles Chou En-Lai might have produced a result, but the tongyong version Jhou Enlai would have drawn a blank.)
I also heard that they thought it would be better to drive on the left side of the road than the right. Driving on the right side of the road might be considered “right-wing” and inappopriate for good Communists
Getting back to Hanyu Pinyin it is probably the only useful thing Communist China could contribute to Taiwan. Tongyong Pinyin… well it definitely is 痛用
At the risk of driving this further off topic, the version I have heard from numerous sources is that that idea was proposed by red guards but nixed by the government - specifically, by Zhou Enlai.
(Zhou Enlai Tongzhi Zai Shoudu Hongweibing Zuotanhui Shang de Jianghua = Comrade Zhou Enlai’s Talk at the Red Guard’s Forum in the Capital City.)
(It would have been harder for me to find that quote if I didn’t know the Hanyu pinyin spelling of Zhou Enlai. Wade-Giles Chou En-Lai might have produced a result, but the tongyong version Jhou Enlai would have drawn a blank.)[/quote]
If you are going to study Chinese you use Hanyu Pinyin. Any doubters will be cutting themselves off from being able to read the bibliographies in Sinological publications such as the China Quarterly which can often contain paragraphs of Hanyu Pinyin. Tongyong Pinyin is irrelevant nonsense.
Tongyong Pinyin is merely a device by which Taiwan seeks to emphasize its “separateness” from the mainland. Who cares if it is not fit for the purpose it is intended ?
How do you say “cutting off your nose to spite your face” again ?
How are we supposed to know the CH is pronouced ? it can represent at least 4 different sounds. Our best guess is to pronouce it ‘Ch’ which is not very close, ‘J’ is closer, but ‘Zh’ is spot on.
Here’s a question: Let’s say that Tongyong Pinyin could be proven to be 10% better than Hanyu Pinyin (I don’t know how you would do it, but let’s say you could). Would that be a good enough reason for the central government to adopt it?
I’d say no, because Tongyong Pinyin would still cause problems for tourists and foreign investors (which Taiwan says it wants more of) and would lead to the island being marginalized. And given Taiwan’s size, it’s unlikely that Tongyong Pinyin, even if it were proven to be the better system, would ever replace Hanyu Pinyin as the global standard. Given this, unless Taiwan’s goal is to marginalize itself, which would fly in the face of what the government is proclaiming, the adoption of Tongyong Pinyin is a bit of a disaster.
I could come up with something a little better than Hanyu Pinyin, I would get rid of the silly ‘I’ thing ie. Shi vs Xi, and the -ian thing, and the unpronouced Y and W
Taipei City decided on Hanyu Pinyin right? And over the last year or so, nearly all the street signs have been changed (the big ones anyway).
So how about other things, especially MRT stations. Isn’t it silly to have the MRT station on the corner of Zhongxiao and Xinsheng called j.u.ng.s.i.ao. / s.i.n.s.e.n.g (or howevere they spell it)?
Also how abotu bus romanisation.
Actually I’ve figured out their new system, which I shall call zhuyinified pinyin.
They take the zhuyin, and convert it, symbol by symbol to pinyin.
So what should be zhong, becomes zhueng, because they’re taking the zhuyin (bopomofo) symbols (any way to type these?) equivalent to ‘zh’, ‘wu/u’ and ‘ong’ and using a little chart to convert that to zhueng. Same for dueng and others. (You should ad ‘bus romanisation aka zhuyinified pinyin’ to your list Cranky )
Hanyu pinyin generally follows the path of keeping things as short and simple as possible. Thus, xu instead of xu(umlaut), etc., and i as both short and long vowel. The usefulness of this approach is perhaps not as visible until looked at from the perspective of words (which is, of course, best anyway).
Tongyong’s approach, with i for the long vowel and ih for the short one is not only more verbose but also requires regressive reading. Take, for example, the word xihuan. Tongyong would rather make life more difficult for readers by using one consonant for two different sounds than adopt the x convention, so hanyu’s xi becomes si. Thus, it’s impossible to know what sound s stands for until after reading the following letter. (For more on this, see The Response Conflict Problem in Reading Tongyong Pinyin: A Cognitive Perspective.) It actually gets worse than this, because hanyu pinyin’s si is represented by sih. So si equals xi but sih equals si. Thus, people have to read to the third letter before they know how to pronounce the first one. This gets even more complicated when viewed on the word level (which is really the only one that ultimately matters).
To get back to xihuan, in tongyong xi is si, as I already mentioned. And huan is the same in both systems. But writing sihuan then takes the regression another letter. People have to go all the way to the u to know how the s is pronounced.
The sometimes unpronounced y and w are similarly useful. Without them, much greater use of the apostrophe would be needed to indicate syllable breaks, which is not such a good thing because experience in Taiwan has already shown how easily apostrophes can be [incorrectly] omitted. Right now, fewer than 2 percent of hanyu pinyin words require an apostrophe. But without y and w that figure would increase many times, with an even greater increase in related misspellings, mispronunciations, and confusion.
The more I have looked at hanyu pinyin as a complete, word-based system, the more impressed with it I have become.
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