For the eleventh time, it is not pinyin, what is pinyin? that is not what locals learn at school, those are English letters, they are read in English and the reason you do not speak Chinese right is because you are reading the letters in English. That is why the names of places are pronounced by the locals like that, because they are written the wrong way, in English! So, the only solution is to take away the English letters…
(as quoted from my coworkers).
Not talking about the weird butchered pingyin, but Taiwanese romanization such as Tailo, or POJ.
Technically… they are Latin alphabets. So to get the right pronunciation, just learn how the letter should sound like in IPA or Latin, then you’d get a lot closer to the actual pronunciation. And why did the forum force the spelling of Tα㎡∫μi to Danshui last night??
Sorry, but you’re wrong. During time of the Spanish, Dutch, Zheng, and early Qing, it was known as Hobe 滬尾.
The late Qing changed the name to 淡水 after the river, which in Taiwanese (and in western sources of the time) is Tam-sui (or Tansui in the Japanese pronunication).
Using “Danshui” (Hanyu Pinyin Mandarin spelling) to refer to the town is pretty recent.[/quote]
No, Hobe (or HoBue) is the later name. HoBue is a relational geographic name, marking the area to be “end the port”. The name Tam-sui (frak, stop censoring me) occurred in the Spanish recordings as soon as they ventured out of Santissima Trinidad (keelong) area and their fort San Salvador sometime after 1626.
After 1630, Dominican Friar Jacinto Esquivel wrote two dictionary for Tam-sui area aboriginals called “Vocabularino de la lengua de los Indios Tanchui en la Isla Hermosa” and “Doctrina cristiana en la lengua de los Indios Tanchui en la Isla Hermosa”
That name has survived for over 300 years.
Hmm, I was pretty sure that in those days Tamsui applied to the river, and Hobe to the port at the end of the river. Esquivel was writing of the “Indios” in the area, not just in the little settlement at the mouth of the river, no? Happy to be proven wrong, by the way!
He he, after reviving this thread the worms a crawling again…
I just wanted to point out that the new/old spelling has already lead to the mispronounciation by the MRT announcer, thus contributing to the confusion of foreign travelers.
So for me it’s less a matter of correctness but more one about the practicality, how it effects people in daily life. Apart from foreign historians and scholars who should be educated enough to recogize the town’s name either way, it is of absolutely no practical use for other people as far as I can tell. But it definitely causes some confusion. It also introduces an unnecessary exception to the officially accepted rule of transliteration, which could lead to more exceptions in the future. It did cost a lot of money to make the change and did force various government departments to spend time dealing with this petty matter (not that they have anything more important to do, but still).
The Wade–Giles system was designed to transcribe Chinese terms, for Chinese specialists
The reason English speakers pronounced Peking as ‘pee king’ instead of Beijing is simply because they are not trained to read Wade-Giles.
As is noted on pinyin.info "Although the system is linguistically sound, it has proved largely ineffective in popular use. "
That’s why everyone else has ditched it. Taiwan, however, insists on using it and Taipei Metro, Taiwan Railways et. al. will insist on grabbing any old FOB off the street to do their announcements. Hence Tamm Suee, Pan Chow, and other gross mispronunciations. The mispronunciation is then accepted by locals as the official English name.
I hates it.
Look at this example in zhu yao, WG and Hanyu: ‘ㄅㄟ, pei, bei’ All three are meant to be pronounced as ‘bay’. Just because WG uses ‘P’ doesn’t make it pronounced ‘Pay’. Sinologists know this, mugs on the street don’t.
Esquivel said: “These tides sweep in some pine trees and other fragrant wood, massive logs, and very strong and durable wood. They are milled in the Tamchuy fort, where they are sawn and cut for building storage houses and for renovating the fort itself, which is made of wood and logs” (Spaniards in Taiwan, 167)
This passage is talking about the fort later came to be known as Santo Domingo (which later became know as Fort Antonio, British Consular Residence and Âng-mn̂g-siâⁿ).
I remember when I was reading “Spaniards in Taiwan” there was other passages addressing Tamchuy as a location even before the fort was built.
The Spanish were pretty erratic about their spelling of most Taiwanese locations, so even though it is usually spelt as Tamchuy, as shown before it is spelt as Tanchui other times. Or is the y and i switch some Spanish grammar rule, sorry, my spanish is non-existent.
Sinologists are a bunch of fail tardclowns for coming up with Wade Giles then. It’s like me designing a system of flashcards for my students that’s all very logical and consistent, but where a cat is called a goldfish and a dog is called a stick insect, or where I have my own secret code whereby 6 really means one and and 3 really means two, thus 6 + 6 = 3. What a bloody nonsense. No wonder people are confused. It took me months to work out why the hell the word for middle was spelt four different ways here, and I worked with a guy for a couple of years who refused to believe that it was pronounced as anything other than how a native English speaker would pronounce it literally in WG. By his reasoning, if it was written chung, then obviously it was chung. It’s just that no one else had a bloody clue what he was talking about when he said he needed to go to Chungli, and I (despite not speaking Chinese) had to interpret for him!
Maybe he’d get lucky and someone would point him the way to find Chun-Li. Way better and hotter than going to Zhongli.
I think Romanization (transliteration into Latin alphabets) of Mandarin in Taiwan should consider being compatible with other Taiwanese languages, such as Holo, Hakka and Aboriginal languages.
The best way to go is get it as close to IPA as possible, that’s why I think Tailo has the right idea.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_ … ion_System
That way, you learn some IPA, and you can read and pronounce all Taiwanese languages. In a perfect world, where politicians are not busy selling out the country, that would be the way to go.
Just because nobody has said it so far that I’ve read in this thread (I just read the last page), to give a valid justification for why it’s written ‘p’ instead of ‘b’ (my phonetics are written in IPA throughout this page, not KK or something else - that is, all the stuff written between the slashes /*/):
The /b/ sound in Mandarin doesn’t exist, actually. Mandarin has unvoiced /p/ and aspirated /p^h/ (that’s a superscript h, which I don’t know how to write), or sometimes written /p’/. English has three bilabial plosives, /b/ (voiced), /p/ (unvoiced), and aspirated /p^h/. However, we only make a distinction between /b/ and /p^h/ (which we write ‘p’).
Any word that has an ‘sp’ in it, though, like spot or spy or speak, actually has the ‘p’ pronounced as a /p/, not a /p^h/, it’s just that since we’re not trained to hear the difference, and it only occurs in certain places, we can’t hear it clearly.
Try saying: boy, spy, pay
If you try to lop off the ‘s’ in ‘spy’, and just say /p/, you’ll notice it’s quite different from the /p^h/ in ‘pay’ AND the /b/ in ‘boy’. For the vast majority of English speakers, though, the /p/ in ‘spy’ sounds an awful lot like the /b/ in ‘boy’ if you lop off the ‘s’ and say it by itself. Just because you can’t hear the difference doesn’t mean they aren’t different - you need a bit of practice, but it can be done!
There are other languages that make the same distinction as English (between /b/ and /p^h), and there are those that make a distinction similar to Chinese (between /p/ and /p^h/). For example, Indonesian has /p/ (written ‘b’) and /p^h/ (written ‘p’). Yet others make a distinction between and have letters for all three. Taiwanese, for example, uses the system b for /b/, p for /p/, and ph for /p^h/ - which seems to make sense for me. Or Thai, which uses บ for /b/, ป for /p/, and ผ, พ, and ภ for /p^h/.
Depending on dialect and accent, the /b/ sometimes slides into a “hard /m/” sound, and the /p/ into a /b/ sound, or it could be that the /b/ slides into a /p/, and the /p/ and /p^h/ merge. In English, yet another possibility has happened and that is that /b/ and /p/ merge, while /p^h/ stays separate.
The misunderstanding that causes people to get pissed off when something like Wade-Giles is used is simply that they confuse the way the latin alphabets are pronounced in their own language with the way they are pronounced in another language. For example, ‘z’ is pronounced /z/ in English and /ts/ in German. Should we be upset that German’s pronounce ‘z’ as /ts/? No, that’s simply the way their alphabet is used, and we if we want to learn German, we should learn the pronunciation of the alphabets.
There is another case that doesn’t bother us English speakers so much, which is /t/ and /d/, where a similar thing has happened (compare /d/ /t/ /t^h/ with /b/ /p/ /p^h/), but for some reason /t/ and /d/ are less distinct when speaking quickly so it doesn’t matter.
One problem, however, is the mixing of systems in spellings such as “Taipei”. The ‘T’ should really be written with an apostrophe, making it “T’aipei”. The way it’s written “Taipei” leads one to believe the pronunciation should be /t/-ai-/p/-ei (which would sound like “Daibei” to an English speaker).
For the record, I think Hanyu Pinyin has the cleanest system of representing the sounds in Chinese, although it’s hard for new learners to hear the difference between the English ‘b’ (i.e., /b/) and the Pinyin ‘b’ (i.e., /p/), and it has a few other idiosyncrasies - zh, x, and q come to mind, or the fact that the ‘o’ in ‘bo’ gets the same pronunciation as the ‘uo’ in ‘tuo’ - I don’t think that offsets the value of learning it as it’s simply easier to write than a whole bunch of superscripts or things like “chh”.
(Ok, more like 25c maybe.)
We have a pinyin-izer which corrects common misspellings to ordinary hanyu pinyin. Considering “Tamsui” is an official place name, I just enabled it.
[quote=“greves”]
There is another case that doesn’t bother us English speakers so much, which is /t/ and /d/, where a similar thing has happened (compare /d/ /t/ /t^h/ with /b/ /p/ /p^h/), but for some reason /t/ and /d/ are less distinct when speaking quickly so it doesn’t matter.
One problem, however, is the mixing of systems in spellings such as “Taipei”. The ‘T’ should really be written with an apostrophe, making it “T’aipei”. The way it’s written “Taipei” leads one to believe the pronunciation should be /t/-ai-/p/-ei (which would sound like “Daibei” to an English speaker).
For the record, I think Hanyu Pinyin has the cleanest system of representing the sounds in Chinese, although it’s hard for new learners to hear the difference between the English ‘b’ (i.e., /b/) and the Pinyin ‘b’ (i.e., /p/), and it has a few other idiosyncrasies - zh, x, and q come to mind, or the fact that the ‘o’ in ‘bo’ gets the same pronunciation as the ‘uo’ in ‘tuo’ - I don’t think that offsets the value of learning it as it’s simply easier to write than a whole bunch of superscripts or things like “chh”.
(Ok, more like 25c maybe.)[/quote]
That is a great explanation of it all.
I myself did not know the distinctions until I learned how to use Tailo and POJ to write Taiwanese. I think Taipei should just be written as Tâi-pak.
But how can you say Pinyin is the “cleanest” when you listed off all those idiosyncrasies? It can all be so much easier using a system similar to Tailo.
A related question for those who understand the logic, if any, behind the romanization systems.
The City of Taitung is spelled with a T when in Chinese phonetic script it is clearly d (ㄉ).
To make the logic of this “mistake” even more murky. Taitung is actually a compound word where the second word is “Dong” meaning east. Taiwan’s eastern most city.
Come to think of it… the confusion of “B” with “P” or "T with “D” is natural. I find myself and my students doing it when explore each other’s languages.
Leave it to Taiwan to enshrine the incorrect way. How is this a problem? I’m strict with phonics. Some students on their own want to impress the teacher with the proper pronunciation of the cities they’ve visited. There they stand with their chests all puffed up an proud of themselves when the teacher has to again knock the wind from their sails and try to erase some incorrect information from their minds.
And that ain’t easy. The students thing that books, teachers especially Taiwanese books, are to be heeded as if they were engraved in stone and delivered from heaven. The fact that there is a Genuine Foreigner that speaks the language doesn’t mean much.
So why is there a problem between “t” and “d”?
My lab mates often come to me for pronunciation or grammar tips. A lot of times they would insist that my pronunciation isn’t the same as the dictionary from Yahoo.com.tw, and I must be wrong. I have to point it out to them repeatedly that the kk or whatever phonetic system it uses is often wrong, not just a difference in English accents/American accents, just plain wrong. I also showed them that the yahoo dictionary has a speech button which loads a voice clip of some lady reading the word, and she would sound exactly like me and nothing like the phonetic spelling…
anyway… I tried to get them to use merriam-webster since the phonetics there is more accurate, but since it is not a English-Chinese dictionary, they refuse to use it.
Taiwan_Student, apparently you didn’t read my reply (which was very very long so I understand). As I said,
/d/ , /t/ , and /t^h/ are comparable to
/b/ , /p/, and /p^h/.
A ‘st’ in English will get the /t/ sound, while most other 't’s will get the /t^h/ sound, and in English we blend the /t/ and /d/ sounds together.
[quote]The City of Taidong is spelled with a T when in Chinese phonetic script it is clearly d (ㄉ).
To make the logic of this “mistake” even more murky. Taidong is actually a compound word where the second word is “Dong” meaning east. Taiwan’s eastern most city. [/quote]
This paragraph is completely nonsensical. First of all, T’aitung is not a “compound word.” T’aitung is the name of a city, spelled in Pinyin as “Taidong”, or WG as “T’aitung”, but since the apostrophes commonly get dropped we have Tai[color=#000040]t[/color]ung. I already talked about this before and showed that it’s not really a “mistake” as such, it’s more of a convenience of notation that leads to confusion of the uninformed.
Characters are not (generally) words, and words are (generally) made of multiple characters. 台 and 東 are not words as such, but 台東 is a word (specifically, a place name), and 月台 (yue4tai2 - platform - lit: lunar-stage) and 房東 (fang2dong1 - landlord - lit: house-east) are words. Clearly, the the fact that “lunar-stage” means platform (as in a train station), or the fact that “house-east” means landlord, shows that characters are not necessarily words by themselves, and that the idea of “compound words” in Chinese is not the same as in English. It would be more accurate to say that most words are composed of characters that have some etymological relation to the word they compose, since they are not simply chosen at random.
[quote=“greves”]
Characters are not (generally) words, and words are (generally) made of multiple characters. 台 and 東 are not words as such, but 台東 is a word (specifically, a place name), and 月台 (yue4tai2 - platform - lit: lunar-stage) and 房東 (fang2dong1 - landlord - lit: house-east) are words. Clearly, the the fact that “lunar-stage” means platform (as in a train station), or the fact that “house-east” means landlord, shows that characters are not necessarily words by themselves, and that the idea of “compound words” in Chinese is not the same as in English. It would be more accurate to say that most words are composed of characters that have some etymological relation to the word they compose, since they are not simply chosen at random.[/quote]
房東 (fang2dong1) “house-east” means landlord because in a traditional Han building, the east wing is inhabited by the owner. The west wing is often a guest house. Hence the famous classical novel 西廂記 (Xi Xiang Ji4) “West Wing Story (not as awesome as West wing of the white house)”, which documents two guests at a temple falling in love.
So traditionally, being very low-context, saying “the east wing of the house” refers to the landlord, without referring the a person, similar concept to 陛下 or 庭上.
[quote=“hansioux”]
My lab mates often come to me for pronunciation or grammar tips. A lot of times they would insist that my pronunciation isn’t the same as the dictionary from Yahoo.com.tw, and I must be wrong. I have to point it out to them repeatedly that the kk or whatever phonetic system it uses is often wrong, not just a difference in English accents/American accents, just plain wrong. I also showed them that the yahoo dictionary has a speech button which loads a voice clip of some lady reading the word, and she would sound exactly like me and nothing like the phonetic spelling…
anyway… I tried to get them to use merriam-webster since the phonetics there is more accurate, but since it is not a English-Chinese dictionary, they refuse to use it.[/quote]
:eh: 
True, been here thriteen years and I still don’t believe it though I see it. Let’s not talk about the “U-R”, ER, IR being different in KK but no one can show the difference to me in practice. BTW… KK is mandatory for the test! IPA is not…
I just tell my students and others… Please pronounce place names as spoken in your language except for deleting the tones.
[quote=“greves”]
Characters are not (generally) words, and words are (generally) made of multiple characters. 台 and 東 are not words as such, but 台東 is a word (specifically, a place name), and 月台 (yue4tai2 - platform - lit: lunar-stage) and 房東 (fang2dong1 - landlord - lit: house-east) are words. Clearly, the the fact that “lunar-stage” means platform (as in a train station), or the fact that “house-east” means landlord, shows that characters are not necessarily words by themselves, and that the idea of “compound words” in Chinese is not the same as in English. It would be more accurate to say that most words are composed of characters that have some etymological relation to the word they compose, since they are not simply chosen at random.[/quote]
Sorry for not reading your post clearly. You may be right about not being compound words in Chinese but as a person teaching himself this language, I’ve notice themes be it characters sharing the same markings within a particular subject (date and time words seem to have a little moon embedded in the character sound words having a little mouth just before the picture) and words such as such as size "big/little or about “left/right” going together to form an idea. Maybe a better example would be roots and suffixes that English has. I may be wrong but it helps make Chinese more understandable to me. … for lack of a teacher in my area.
My recommendation for people who want to learn Mandarin is to learn German first. That fine language has, among many other sounds, /b/, /p/ and /p^h/, also /d/, /t/ and /t^h/ and finally /g/, /k/, and /k^h/ - and those 9 sounds are represented by 6 letters: “b”, “d”, “g”, “k”, “p”, and “t”.
So how do Germans “squeeze” 9 into 6?
Easy! As one would expect from the people who were the first to make trees grow in straight lines, everything is done according to “rules”. Depending on the context, the pronunciation of what is written “b” can be either /b/ or /p/ and that of “p” either /p/ or /p^h/, while the letter “g” may be pronounced /g/ or /ʒ/ or /k/ and the letter “k” can stand for the sound /k/ and the sound /k^h/. Analogously, “d” stands at times for the sound /d/ and at other times for /t/, while “t” gets pronounced /t/ or /t^h/… and which is which is just a matter of context.
Once you’ve got that down, Mandarin’s /p/ and /p^h/ and the like is a piece of cake…
(PS: there are no rules, of course - “rules” in languages, like “laws” in nature, are descriptions…)
My recommendation for people who want to learn Mandarin is to learn German first. That fine language has, among many other sounds, /b/, /p/ and /p^h/, also /d/, /t/ and /t^h/ and finally /g/, /k/, and /k^h/ - and those 9 sounds are represented by 6 letters: “b”, “d”, “g”, “k”, “p”, and “t”.
So how do Germans “squeeze” 9 into 6?
Easy! As one would expect from the people who were the first to make trees grow in straight lines, everything is done according to “rules”. Depending on the context, the pronunciation of what is written “b” can be either /b/ or /p/ and that of “p” either /p/ or /p^h/, while the letter “g” may be pronounced /g/ or /zh/ or /k/ and the letter “k” can stand for the sound /k/ and the sound /k^h/. Analogously, “d” stands at times for the sound /d/ and at other times for /t/, while “t” gets pronounced /t/ or /t^h/… and which is which is just a matter of context.
Once you’ve got that down, Mandarin’s /p/ and /p^h/ and the like is a piece of cake…
(PS: there are no rules, of course - “rules” in languages, like “laws” in nature, are descriptions…)[/quote]
hmm… I always thought German is a “spelt as it sounds” kind of language…
I think the most beneficial part of knowing German when learning Chinese is the ü. A lot of people have trouble pronouncing sounds like 魚，not a problem if one already knows how to say über alles.