I altho vant to thay dat vucking tongyong beulzhit makes ABOUT AS MUCH SENSE AS THE FIRST HALF OF THIS SENTENCE.
實踐 ＝ shih chien？ That’s right, because English speakers aren’t capable of making the “j” sound. Let’s make it a ch, like cheese! I like cheese! Oh wait, doesn’t that sound like 前？ Hahaha, it does! Oh well!
(just to give an example)
[color=green]Mod note: I split this from the thread on an online test for character recognition, as it had evolved into an extended discussion on romanization, and I’ll merge it with some suitable extant thread shortly. – DB, LC co-moderator
EDIT – No suitable general thread was found; let this be it.[/color]
實踐 is “shih chien” in Wade-Giles. In Tongyong, it’s “shih jian”, so calm down my English speaking friend, the “j” you so desire is there. Besides, there’s nothing wrong with “chien” per se for representing 踐. After all, romanization schemes need not cater to English speakers. Wade-Giles is closer to the international phonetic alphabet than English in many ways.
For me, the really puzzling part about Tongyong is the “wun” and “fong” constructs. I guess the inventor was trying to encode Taiwanese style pronounciation into the scheme, thinking that if most people on the island say “fong” instead of “feng”, why not just spell it that way. Perhaps it’s an attempt to differentiate Mandarin on Taiwan versus Mandarin in the PRC for political purposes.
[quote=“necroflux”]I altho vant to thay dat vucking tongyong beulzhit makes ABOUT AS MUCH SENSE AS THE FIRST HALF OF THIS SENTENCE.
實踐 ＝ shih chien？ That’s right, because English speakers aren’t capable of making the “j” sound. Let’s make it a ch, like cheese! I like cheese! Oh wait, doesn’t that sound like 前？ Hahaha, it does! Oh well!
(just to give an example)[/quote]
Well, you’re right about Tongyong being nonsense, but what you wrote there is actually Wade-Giles, a much older system. 實踐 in Tongyong is shih-jian.
Wade-Giles is a respectable system, in use for many years, which is now dated. Tongyong is a horrible politicised train-wreck of a beast and should be quietly led out the back to be put out of its misery.
It should also be noted that none of these systems (even Tongyong) has problems with internal consistency - i.e. 千 and 間; 昌 and 章 etc can all be distinguished.
Oh… er… my bad. I guess I’ve never seen the Tongyong system then. Seriously though what were Mr. Wade and Mr. Giles smoking when they came up with that stuff??
The system is quite sensible. The English j and ch are close relatives as the latter is just an aspirated version of the former. In Wade-Giles, the English j sound is represented by ch, an unaspirated English “ch” sound. The English “ch” sound is represented in W-G by ch’. Note the apostrophe in this case indicating an aspirated initial. Following this to its logical conclusion, the English k is represented in W-G by k’ while the unaspirated version k is equivalent to a hard English g. Similarly, English t = W-G t’ while English d = W-G t.
My favourite scheme is actually MPS II (bopomofo being MPS I), which is essentially the Yale system but with some minor modern tweaks. It avoids the dreaded q, x, zh initials of Hanyu Pinyin and also uses a much preferred (IMO) ts instead of c.
Haha indeed. One question - are most of these systems intended to provided romanization corresponding to English, or just any western language? If the latter is the case then I am completely wrong in my thinking.
But in the case of xiu, for example, because English has no words spelled like this it is no problem in my mind to “create” a new sound, corresponding to what xiu1 sounds like in Chinese. And of course no system can be perfect, or even close. But using ch to represent a j sound when clearly j would suffice is a huge mystery to me. Maybe English and Chinese pronunciation has change that much since the Wade Giles system was created??
The system is quite sensible. The English j and ch are close relatives as the latter is just an aspirated version of the former. In Wade-Giles, the English j sound is represented by ch, an unaspirated English “ch” sound. The English “ch” sound is represented in W-G by ch’. Note the apostrophe in this case indicating an aspirated initial. Following this to its logical conclusion, the English k is represented in W-G by k’ while the unaspirated version k is equivalent to a hard English g. Similarly, English t = W-G t’ while English d = W-G t.[/quote]
But again… why go through all of the complication? When it just so happens that the aspirated j almost perfectly corresponds to the sound in 句, and the unaspirated ch almost perfectly corresponds to 吃? :s
Haha indeed. One question - are most of these systems intended to provided romanization corresponding to English, or just any western language? If the latter is the case then I am completely wrong in my thinking.
But in the case of xiu, for example, because English has no words spelled like this it is no problem in my mind to “create” a new sound, corresponding to what xiu1 sounds like in Chinese. And of course no system can be perfect, or even close. But using ch to represent a j sound when clearly j would suffice is a huge mystery to me. Maybe English and Chinese pronunciation has change that much since the Wade Giles system was created??[/quote]
Ah, but a j wouldn’t sound like an English j to a Spanish speaker. Wade-Giles wasn’t invented to cater to English speakers. This is very obvious in its treament of the letter j, which is equivalent to the Hanyu Pinyin r.
The Hanyu Pinyin x can be adequately described with an English shi. In fact MPS II uses this exact system – xiu would be shiu, xiang would be shiang, and xu would be shiu. From an English speaker point of view, the latter is much closer than the x could ever be. In Wade-Giles, the equivalent is hs.
The system is quite sensible. The English j and ch are close relatives as the latter is just an aspirated version of the former. In Wade-Giles, the English j sound is represented by ch, an unaspirated English “ch” sound. The English “ch” sound is represented in W-G by ch’. Note the apostrophe in this case indicating an aspirated initial. Following this to its logical conclusion, the English k is represented in W-G by k’ while the unaspirated version k is equivalent to a hard English g. Similarly, English t = W-G t’ while English d = W-G t.[/quote]
But again… why go through all of the complication? When it just so happens that the aspirated j almost perfectly corresponds to the sound in 句, and the unaspirated ch almost perfectly corresponds to 吃? :s[/quote]
Hmm…I’m not sure I understand your point.
English ch, an aspirated sound, is equivalent to a Hanyu Pinyin q, which is equivalent to a Wade-Giles ch’. Let’s take the character 去; if you were to spell this using English phonetics, you will end up with something like cheeyu or chiu or ch…, the point being that it’ll start with “ch”. In Hanyu Pinyin, it starts with q (qu4), does that make sense at all in your opinion? In W-G, it is ch’ü. In this case, W-G is closer to English than Hanyu Pinyin.
Now let’s transform the W-G ch’, an aspirated sound, and make it an unaspirated sound. It then becomes an English j sound, which is also a j in Hanyu Pinyin, but is a ch in W-G (just remove the apostrophe for unaspirated). For the character 句, English phonetics may end up being juu or jeeyoo or j… while the Hanyu Pinyin is ju and the W-G is chü. From an English speaker’s perspective, in this case, the Hanyu Pinyin is closer. However, W-G makes more sense logically because 去 and 句 are actually very close in pronunciation. The only difference is aspiration. W-G makes clear their interrelationship by having both character transliterated in the same way save an apostrophe while the same cannot be said for Hanyu Pinyin or any other romanization scheme that I’m aware of.
Okay if that’s the case then indeed nothing I am arguing holds water. If you want a general romanization system that doesn’t apply to just one western language then indeed the letters you choose are almost arbitrary.
[quote=“sjcma”]
English ch, an aspirated sound, is equivalent to a Hanyu Pinyin q, which is equivalent to a Wade-Giles ch’. Let’s take the character 去; if you were to spell this using English phonetics, you will end up with something like cheeyu or chiu or ch…, the point being that it’ll start with “ch”. In Hanyu Pinyin, it starts with q (qu4), does that make sense at all in your opinion? In W-G, it is ch’ü. In this case, W-G is closer to English than Hanyu Pinyin.[/quote]
Well, in this case and in your previous example I would extrapolate a bit - the English “ch” sound is neither perfect for 出 nor 區, but a close representation to each. You can only choose to use “ch” to represent one of the two, so the creators of Pinyin then apparently chose “q” to represent the other, I would assume because this is a very rarely used letter (at least in English, not sure about other western languages). The same for sh - it’s somewhere in between 是 and 系. So they use the sh for one, and pick another rare letter combo (xi) to represent the latter.
If you picked a random person off the street, (again, using English as an example), and asked them to read the letters shi off a page, I would guess (as did the creators of Pinyin) that the majority would pronounce something a lot closer to 是 than 系. The same goes for 出 and 區.
Edit: Actually in rethinking the second paragraph I’m not sure I would make that guess, in fact I’d probably go the opposite way. Pinyin Sux0rs!!! Hahaha
Actually, when properly applied (with diacritics and apostrophes), W-G is quite accurate. In fact, the sound represented by p (HYPY’s b) is rightly shown as an unvoiced consonant, whereas b leads people to believe it’s voiced. This reserved room for additional dialects that have a true voiced b, such as Hokkien. Tioh bo?
Okay if that’s the case then indeed nothing I am arguing holds water. If you want a general romanization system that doesn’t apply to just one western language then indeed the letters you choose are almost arbitrary.[/quote]
If you’re looking for a romanization scheme that comes closest to English, then Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II) would be my pick and as noted earlier, my preferred scheme.
I mindfully beat the HYPY drums because it happens to be the international standard (UN and ISO recognized) and is now pretty much universally used for teaching Chinese outside of Taiwan. Plus, mainland tourists will be coming here, and if they have trouble reading traditional characters they could at least read the HYPY.
If Taiwan truly wants to internationalize (and I have my doubts about that), as well as boost its economic ties with the mainland, then it should embrace HYPY. If it can’t do that, then at least it should have stuck with its legacy Wade-Giles convention, instead of inventing yet another system to make things even more confusing.
Well, you’re best off sticking with the most widely used system, and its quirks are few in number. You also get access to some very good tools which use this system, such as the ABC Comprehensive Chinese-English Dictionary from U. Hawaii Press.
Tongyong was a non-starter from the beginning, and will end up on the trash heap of unused harebrained romanization schemes eventually.
Yup. Pinyin’s “juan” looks like the name Juan (meaning “John”; pronounced like English ‘huan’ but with a rougher ‘h’) to me.
Agree 100% - there is no choice but Hanyu Pinyin, realistically. I have a soft spot for Wade-Giles though, I think it’s cool in an old school kind of way (when it’s used properly).
Interesting aside: Herbert Giles, a British diplomat and the refiner of Wade’s original romanisation, lived in Danshui for three years in the late 19th century, and worked there on the improved system that became Wade-Giles.
Pinyin’s “juan” looks like the name Juan (meaning “John”; pronounced like English ‘huan’ but with a rougher ‘h’) to me.