It’s finally more or less finished – just a year or two late…
Please let me know what else you’d like to see there and, gently, where I’ve screwed up. 
cool, I like the layout design, you’re very good with that css thingy 
ax
cranky, there’s a different set of romanization used in Indonesia, may be you can research on this and put it on your website too. I know several old Chinese - Indonesian dictionary that uses this romanization. Romanization is a mess in Indonesia too. I hope by putting that in your site, might bring some light to this area.
ax
This is very interesting. Thanks for mentioning this. I would love to see a copy of this romanization scheme. I wonder what its period of use was – or if it’s still being used today. Is this for Mandarin or a different Chinese language? (What’s the dominant Chinese language among the ethnic Chinese of Indonesia?)
And thanks for the kind words about my site.
If anyone’s interested in a banner (though I don’t run banners on my own site and so wouldn’t reciprocate, at least in that form), I have a standard 468 x 60 one available here: pinyin.info/banners/PinyinInfo468x60.gif
(It’s the same as in my sig.) All links, with or without banners, sincerely appreciated.
Ax, you’re talking about a Chinese romanization system for Bahasa Indonesia? That’s understandable, virtually every major language has its own Chinese romanization, sometimes more than one. The reason for their existence is that each uses the orthography of its target language, to make it most readable to the target audience.
German has something called the Lessing-Othmer system. In Hungary, Wade-Giles is used in academic circles, with Hanyu Pinyin making headway. However, in news articles you’ll see another romanization called Popular Hungarian Transcription, as seen in the 2nd column of this table:
http://www.kaplarbalazs.com/pinyin-magyar.pdf
Notice the use of AJ instead of AI, CS instead of CH. Each romanization has such idiosyncrasies (wow, first time I ever used that word). The weakness of this system is that it’s heavily in fluenced by Wade-Giles.
I have heated debates in Hungarian about the merits of different Chinese romanizations for our language, just like we have debates about romanizations for English.
Hanyu Pinyin is the most universal romanization, but ironically both native and non-native English speakers have trouble initially with X, Q and ZH. Maybe this is part of HP’s success, that it’s equally weird in all languages. However, a single romanization will never displace all the existing locale-specific romanizations, they all exist for a purpose.
I think Cranky can do some research into this and include it in his site… so we can have a comparison of Chinese romanization used worldwide specific to language locale…
ax
It would be no small task to try to collect all the different Chinese romanizations that have ever been devised around the world. There must be dozens if not hundreds. Then you might go on to include transcriptions of Chinese into other non-Roman alphabets like Japanese or Korean. Comparing them would be a very academic and not too interesting piece of work.
What might be a more interesting topic for a linguist to study WHY there are so many different systems.
I think there are two categories of romanizations, with some overlap: scientific and popular. Scientific systems are devised by linguists, and they aim to include as much phonetic information as possible, using diacritical marks and often unintuitive spellings (to make the linguists look smarter). Popular romanizations fill a different niche and have different requirements:
- be easy to sound out for average reader, without having to learn rules and conventions
- fully utiliize the available alphabet of the target language, but not introduce any new unfamiliar marks or symbols
- ease of use is more important than accuracy
…
Cranky one idea I had, which might be good for your site (or your old site, which was not just about romanisation) would be a list of Taiwanese place names with pinyin, traditional romanisation, hanzi, and common foreign spelling/names. It’s this last one in bold, that I think would be useful for place names like The Pescadores, Cape Santiago, Amoy (OK, not Taiwan but relevant), Takao, etc. The list could also include old names like Taiwan Fu. This would be useful to people reading Taiwanese history. I think I’ve got most of those names straight, but it took me a while.
Brian
Hey Brian - I estimate about 199 man years for this project with a lot of overtime and some help from your friends. Do you plan to live that long?
I just meant for the majopr place names in Taiwan.
Brian
Hi Mark,
The new site looks superb! Great job. My first comment is to please add your email link as an explicit address rather than a “let me know” link, because it doesn’t work if the “default client is not properly installed”. I cannot solve the latter problem due to system issues (and/or poor tech support) at my company, so if I didn’t know you were Cranky, I wouldn’t have had any way to give you feedback.
Second, I would just add that I strongly prefer the addition of tone marks above all pinyin, including on the street signs, because foreigners who read only pinyin and know the tones can then pronounce the names properly in order to communicate them to other people. The slightly cluttered result is mostly the result of the typesetting (the font you’ve chosen), and is easily improved with a slight adjustment. It is also the result of the example (ji) you picked, and is not a problem with most syllables.
Keep up the great work!
Kent
Thanks, everyone, for the feedback so far. Please continue to add comments as you think of them.
Re. lists of many different romanization systems: I plan on adding some more (EFEO should go up this weekend, I think). But I’m not sure if I want them all there. My position is that people should use Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin, and I worry about muddying the water by tossing in information about too many other systems. On the other hand, it’s an interesting subject (to me, at least 
). I would certainly appreciate hearing about other systems. Another problem is that it’s difficult to get reliable information on romanization systems. Many people would be amazed how many mistakes there are in romanization charts – even in those prepared for dictionaries, where you would think that caution and care would reign supreme.
Re. the split between scientific and popular romanization systems, Palmer has some interesting related comments in his book on romanization. I may add part of that book to my site, even though I disagree with many of his conclusions, because it helps break down thinking about romanization into useful categories.
I like the idea of a list of place names and their variants. Even just a list of the Japanese place names would be useful. I’ve yet to find one – even in book form – and have been too lazy to go about compiling the list myself. (Again, the problem of variant spellings in the romanization isn’t a new thing; and Japan went through some romanization-system shifts of its own during its rule of Taiwan.) I’d probably put that on Romanization.com instead of Pinyin.info.
I put in the extra layer of text as a way of reducing the amount of spam I receive as a result of having an e-mail address posted on a website. Your point is noted, though. My extra precaution is probably unnecessary anyway, as I use the Hiveware Enkoder to encode my e-mail address; I strongly recommend that those of you with websites use this tool as well.
(The page referred to here is Street Sign Styles.)
I used to think the same as you on this issue. Gradually, however, my thinking has changed. Basically, I don’t want romanization to be more complicated than is necessary. With street signs, this is a tough call. For guidebooks, etc., though, I most certainly encourage the use of tone marks. As I wrote on the page mentioned above, this is something that needs further study. It’s a complicated issue.
Cranky,
Excellent site. A couple of suggestions:
The main thing I missed was the ‘absolute beginners intro to romanization’. The site is clearly aimed at people who understand the principals of romanization, know there are multiple systems and want some more details. However, when I first thought about learning Chinese, I wasn’t clear about the relationship between the characters and the sounds (in different dialects), and didn’t even know there was more than one way to romanize characters. A page on this basic level would be pretty useful to newbies.
A bit of context on the street signs page would be useful - someone using the site from the US would have a bit of trouble following your mini-rant about Ma’s “innovation” with street names in Taipei … what’s that got to do with Pinyin?
Also, the links along the top of pinyin.info/rules/initials_finals.html seem to be wrong (apart from tools they’ve all got an extra ‘rules/’ in them).
Here are some new things on my site:
[ul][li]Is Tongyong Pinyin easier to type than Hanyu Pinyin?[/li]
[li]Explanation of Mr. Murray’s System for Teaching Sighted Chinese to Read and Write. (From an 1898 book that explains how a method for Chinese braille was adapted for sighted people. I don’t recommend the method; but it’s interesting to read about nonetheless.)[/li]
[li]The Lord’s Prayer in Mandarin Chinese (as written in the Murray system).[/li][/ul]The pages on the Murray system still have a few rough edges, so don’t worry about reporting link problems, etc., for those.
[quote]A page on this basic level would be pretty useful to newbies.[/quote]Good idea. I’m working on it.
[quote]A bit of context on the street signs page would be useful[/quote]Ditto.
[quote] links along the top of pinyin.info/rules/initials_finals.html seem to be wrong[/quote]I’ve redone all the navigation for the site, moving to PHP includes. It was much easier to have HTML processed as PHP than I had imagined.
Is Tongyong Pinyin easier to type than Hanyu Pinyin?
That’s just about the dumbest thing I ever heard. Thx for that laugh Cranky. Do Tongyong supporters really say this, that their system is faster to type because of the way you alternate your hands on the keyboard? Doesn’t that imply that we need a different pinyin for each keyboard layout, not to mention cellphones and PDAs? Alternately, we should come up with a version of English that only uses the letters ASDFGHJKL so that we don’t have to move our fingers.
The only things that are not completely retarded about Tongyong in my opinion are the following three syllables:
- fong for Hanyu Pinyin’s feng
- wong for Hanyu Pinyin’s weng
- wun for Hanyu Pinyin’s wen
These are the only three cases that support the argument that Tongyong is closer to the Taiwanese pronunciation.
But for some reason the Tongyong people didn’t bother to change beng to bong, meng to mong, and peng to pong, even though most Taiwanese say Ponghu to mean the Pescadores, and Mongzi to mean Mencius. Therefore, any claim to consistency has been fudged.
I’ve thought about this issue, and I think the sensible thing to do would be NOT to invent a new system, but to EXPAND the existing Hanyu Pinyin to include alternate forms like the 6 mentioned above. In other words, bong, fong, mong, pong, wong, and wun would all be valid Hanyu Pinyin spellings. Then, you could choose the appropriate one depending on the dialect of Mandarin you want to write. For example, you could write “wind” as feng with a Beijing accent or fong with a Taiwanese accent. This could open up a big can of worms, but I think the idea is worth exploring. And no, I’m not talking about expanding Hanyu Pinyin to cover all the dialects of Chinese, just all the flavors of Mandarin.
By the way, I think I already use these these alternate Taiwanese spellings subconsciously, and I bet others do as well.
cranky,
here’s the table someone promised me, it contains romanization for chinese used in asia.
www.chinesesquabble.com/mps.jpg
ax
Thanks, ax. 
The image looks a little like some things I’ve seen from the Taiwan government. Do you know the source?
It’s a little hard to know why exactly they say that TP is easier to type – the usual suspects of x’s and q’s, I suppose. The bit about alternating hands is actually mine; I obvously need to rewrite this section to make it clearer what I’m talking about.
[quote]The only things that are not completely retarded about Tongyong in my opinion are the following three syllables:
- fong for Hanyu Pinyin’s feng
- wong for Hanyu Pinyin’s weng
- wun for Hanyu Pinyin’s wen
These are the only three cases that support the argument that Tongyong is closer to the Taiwanese pronunciation.[/quote]
Wen/wun is an odd case. I don’t think they’re really supposed to be pronounced differently; it’s more a matter that many people (including Tongyong’s creators, I believe) don’t know how Hanyu Pinyin works.
The -un in dun, tun, nun, etc., is actually a shortened way to write -uen. Thus, HP’s wen is completely regular: It’s uen without an initial in front of it, and so the u shifts to w; thus wen. Tongyong’s spelling in this case, while perhaps initially more intuitive, is actually quite quirky.
See my chart of Mandarin initials and finals in Hanyu Pinyin.
I’m wary of introducing variant spellings – especially before standardization really sets in.
New on my site: “Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform,” a long and very important essay that addresses the successful use of an alphabetic system to write a Mandarin-like language.