Hanyu pinyin to be official in 2009

Taiwan Living in Taiwan
61

Hanyu Pinyin is definitely not the best form of romanization, because it’s all based on personal preference, but it’s definitely the most widely used. In terms of actual usefulness, I must argue that GR (Gwoyeu Romatzyh) is absolutely the best. It represents tones not with the “tone marks” which are really hard to remember and seem like an afterthought, but represent the tones with DIFFERENT SPELLING. Amazing! People who use GR to learn Mandarin have amazing tonal ability. I’m planning to start from the beginning using GR.

Witness: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoyeu_Romatzyh

For example; guo = guo1, gwo = guo2, guoo = guo3, and guoh = guo4

If that isn’t genius, then I don’t know what is. Also, nobody ever told me at the beginning that the tones are not just “tones,” but also dictate the actual spoken LENGTH of the words!

My last comment is that standardizing the spelling of signs, and by extension place and road names, wouldn’t really help foreigners who have never studied Mandarin in asking a Taxi driver to take them to a particular location. Furthermore, many people who have just started studying Chinese using HYPY still mispronounce many words (tone mark or no tone mark) and if the genuine characters can’t be read by person in question, they may still find themselves up against the wall at times.

My post-last comment is that I just hope that Taiwan doesn’t start using ugly-arse simplified characters.

62

Spelled Ke-lâng, it does indeed sound a bit like Gay-lung.[/quote]

more like gay lang, not gay lung.

And I reallly think the original names for places in Taiwan should stay the same…none of this taibei nonsense and really “i.l.a.n” should stay as it is , and has been for oh soo long. It shouldnt have been changed to “Yilan” , although the latter is more correct in pronunciation.

We dont say Roma, we say Rome, we dont say Venezia, we say Venice, we dont say Firenze, we say Florence. OR should we really change those?

63

[quote=“shawn_c”]Hanyu Pinyin is definitely not the best form of romanization, because it’s all based on personal preference.[/quote]Eh? Whose personal preference? Chairman Mao?

[quote=“shawn_c”]many people who have just started studying Chinese using HYPY still mispronounce many words.[/quote]The same is true whatever spelling is used. Some people just aren’t very gifted at pronouncing foreign languages.

[quote=“shawn_c”]My post-last comment is that I just hope that Taiwan doesn’t start using ugly-arse simplified characters.[/quote]Taiwanese people do use a lot of simplified characters in handwriting.

64

I think Kaohsiung should be renamed “Takow”.

65

I think Kaohsiung should be renamed “Takow”.[/quote]

Wouldnt work because the locals call it Kaohsiung. NObody calls it takow.

Unlike when they changed BOMBAY officially back to MUMBAI. That was because the people actually pronounced the place MUMBAI.

If people pronounced Kaohsiung as TAkow, then yes, I would agree.

Kaohsiung is such a stupid name tho. K-town is a lot better :smiley:

66

[quote=“shawn_c”]Hanyu Pinyin is definitely not the best form of romanization, because it’s all based on personal preference, but it’s definitely the most widely used. In terms of actual usefulness, I must argue that GR (Gwoyeu Romatzyh) is absolutely the best. It represents tones not with the “tone marks” which are really hard to remember and seem like an afterthought, but represent the tones with DIFFERENT SPELLING. Amazing! People who use GR to learn Mandarin have amazing tonal ability. I’m planning to start from the beginning using GR.

Witness: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwoyeu_Romatzyh

For example; guo = guo1, gwo = guo2, guoo = guo3, and guoh = guo4[/quote]
If you like tonal spelling, then you may very well like ironlady’s Tonally Orthographic Pinyin. GUO=guo1, guO=guo2, guo=guo3, Guo=guo4, guo*=guo5. Very functional if not aesthetically pleasing. As for GR, it’s a pain; I’d use fanqie before resorting to GR.

[quote=“tommy525”]And I reallly think the original names for places in Taiwan should stay the same…none of this taibei nonsense and really “i.l.a.n” should stay as it is , and has been for oh soo long. It shouldnt have been changed to “Yilan” , although the latter is more correct in pronunciation.

We dont say Roma, we say Rome, we dont say Venezia, we say Venice, we dont say Firenze, we say Florence. OR should we really change those?[/quote]
Well, we had Turino 2006 instead of Turin 2006. That aside, whether current spellings should remain depend on the linguistic philosophy of the government (if they even have one that is). What is the purpose of including roman characters on signs and maps? Is it to represent the equivalent Chinese with Mandarin romanisation? Or is it to translate the Chinese into English, supplemented by romanisation as necessary. If the former, then everything should change to the HYPY standard. If the latter, then traditional spellings should be kept and road signs should end with the English word “Road” or “East” or “West” as appropriate. I predict we’ll get a mishmash of Zhongshan Bei Lu and Zhongshan Road North throughout the island.

I think they should rename it “Aihe”. That’d be a cool name.

67

Aihe , Love River. That does sound nice but has no basis in history. Takow apparently (way back when) was the original name for Kaohsiung. But I think it means “hit dog” which is not romantic at all.

I second the motion to call it Love River (Aihe) That could almost compete with Rio de Janiero?

By the way you meant TORINO of course.

68

Let’s hear it for Wade-Giles!
(anyone? anyone?)

69

Except for the fact that the Love River flows right through Kaohsiung, splits the city in half, and is the one and only major waterway that runs through the city centre.

Yes, of course.

70

Well they dont name Paris after the Seine either? And the latter runs right thru Paris non?
But we have drifted way off the topic by now :slight_smile:

71

[quote=“Juba”][quote=“shawn_c”]Hanyu Pinyin is definitely not the best form of romanization, because it’s all based on personal preference.[/quote]Eh? Whose personal preference? Chairman Mao?

[quote=“shawn_c”]many people who have just started studying Chinese using HYPY still mispronounce many words.[/quote]The same is true whatever spelling is used. Some people just aren’t very gifted at pronouncing foreign languages.

By personal preference, I just mean that there’s no “best” form.

Actually, Tongyong Pinyin is more conducive to an English-speaker pronouncing the words, such as “fong” instead of “feng.” Some Chinese romanization schemes favor certain “colonial languages” over others.

Sure, Taiwanese use simplified when writing, but that’s where the vast majority of simplified characters came from in the first place. To quote the venerable Wikipedia: “Cursive written text almost always includes character simplification.” The PRC government just made them official in this case and official is what I would not like to see… for many reasons.

Well, fanqie requires you to already be able to read Chinese! It would certainly be cool to have one of those dictionaries, however.

As I am someone that can’t remember which words are what tones, but can read, I feel that I should’ve started out using GR. It would’ve been easy enough to remember when typing in HYPY just to use the first tone spelling to enter words in all the tones… and it would make using the BPMF way of entry much easier.

72

I disagree. It would take a while to get used to it, but it’s worth being done. Many famous cities have doe it. Busan, Mumbai - even Beijing used to be Peking. It just takes time for people to get used to it. And btw - it’s not changing the name, it’s just changing the way it is written in the latin alphabet.

As for whether one system is ‘better’ than another or not. Well it is partly preference, but there are criteria that we could use to judge. Consistency - readability etc. HP rates top or pretty near.

Anyway, the most important thing is that there’s ONE consistent standard. And that needs to be an international standard. I’m damn glad of the decision.

Brian

73

As a long-time full-time translator, like a couple of others in this thread, the big news for me – and, I’d imagine, for most others that don’t have an emotional or ideological attachment to HY – is not that they decided on HY, but that they decided on one single system to be coherently and comprehensively implemented (well, we’ll have to see about that).

After all, every system, be it HY, TY, Yale, Wade-Giles, Romatzyh, or bopomofo, is only an approximation of the Chinese language sounds, anyway. When you learn that “x” in HY represents a sound that doesn’t have anything to do with the letter x in most languages (there’s probably a slavic language somewhere that has it, since HY was developed with the slavic languages, not English, in mind, if memory serves. Am I right, Juba?), and that “s” in TY represents the same sound, as does “hs” in Wade-Giles, you realize that they are essentially phonetic scripts, where the symbols representing the different sounds – with the exception of bopomofo – are the same symbols used in the alphabet. They’re all approximations. None of the systems is inherently better or worse than the others, regardless of whether the DPP wants TY for ideological reasons or the KMT wants HY for equally ideological reasons.

The main upshot of all this is that beginning Jan 1 next year, we’ll actually now how to spell S/indian, Xindian, H/sintien, X/indien, Hsi/n-tien and Sijh, Sij/hih, Xizhi, H/sichih, Hs/i-chih.

(Oh, and another good thing is that we might get rid of the detestable and prescriptive Forumosa enforcement of HY. Sorry for all the extra forward slashes.)

74

[quote="tommy525]
We dont say Roma, we say Rome, we dont say Venezia, we say Venice, we dont say Firenze, we say Florence. OR should we really change those?[/quote]

“Roma” or “Rome” and “Taipei” or “Taibei” are different in that for the Italian city the choice is between the pronounciation used by the locals and an angliziced version, while for the Taiwan capital the choice is between two forms of transliteration. The locals don’t use “Taipei”. Changing to “Taibei” would cost a lot of money, and the only thing it changes is preventing people from saying “Tai-Pay” instead of the more correct “Tai-Bay”.

75

I disagree. It would take a while to get used to it, but it’s worth being done. Many famous cities have doe it. Busan, Mumbai - even Beijing used to be Peking. It just takes time for people to get used to it. And btw - it’s not changing the name, it’s just changing the way it is written in the latin alphabet.

As for whether one system is ‘better’ than another or not. Well it is partly preference, but there are criteria that we could use to judge. Consistency - readability etc. HP rates top or pretty near.

Anyway, the most important thing is that there’s ONE consistent standard. And that needs to be an international standard. I’m damn glad of the decision.

Brian[/quote]

Now you guys see my problem with Ilan/Yilan controversy. It has been cleared to Yilan, but we still must wait for the final statements from MOE.

By the way, in Spanish we still use “Pekin”, just as we use Quemoy and Amoy. There are academic reasons supporting this usage. Furthermore, in recent view of teh Olympics, several philologists spoke for and against the use of Pekin/Beijing. Some were logical, some hillarious -if it wasn’t too OT I would copy a paragraph that totally blows it.

I do not understand the difficulty with “readability” here. It is a representative system, which means that the “q” cannot be read as it is normally read in your own language. Please note that Spanish is read as it is spelled; since this is not the case with English, I do not understand the mix up. You’re the ones reading “ou” comnbitantions six different ways!

Consistency, that is all I’m asking for. Just as if for political reasons they want this to be called ROC, Taiwan, Formosa, or Never, never land. As long as we agree on one, that’s all I ask, all I care about.

76

Then what about the Swedish “sj” sound, which linguists find hard to categorize?

Yeah, I know it’s off-topic…

77

[quote=“amida”]Let’s hear it for Wade-Giles!
(anyone? anyone?)[/quote]

Boooooooooo, hissssssssss.

78

[quote=“Dragonbones”][quote=“amida”]Let’s hear it for Wade-Giles!
(anyone? anyone?)[/quote]

Boooooooooo, hissssssssss.[/quote]

Well, there’s just something about using consistent and accurate Wades-Giles that seems slightly retro and eccentric, like if I were to see a guy walking down the street with a seersucker suit and a cane. That being said, the only place I recall ever seeing accurate WG was in the National Palace museum.

79

Wade-Giles has a classy look-and-feel to it. Kaohsiung is classier than Gaoxiong in my opinion.

80

Ya but since the people who live in that city mainly speak TAiwanese , it really should be
GO-HEE-ONG.

And why didnt they spell it Kaoshiung , instead of Kaohsiung?