So for place names you can encounter mandarin rendered in hanyu pinyin or wade giles. Or they can be romanisations of taiwanese names following… POJ? Not sure.
I’ve also encountered yale romanisation - not wade giles - in peoples passports.
Personally, I don’t care what romanisation system they use. But just stick to one, and give it tone marks FFS, so we can have some hope of pronouncing it.
And replace it with Yale. Hear hear!
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Make pinyin great again! 
There’s also at least one whole thread about the romanization of 淡水.
Tone marks won’t do squat for people who don’t know Mandarin. And those who do know Mandarin derive only limited benefit from romanization anyway.
The simple fact is you can’t convey the sound adequately and efficiently with the Roman alphabet no matter what you try. It’s hopeless.
Tone marks won’t do squat for people who don’t know Mandarin. And those who do know Mandarin derive only limited benefit from romanization anyway.
You’re dividing people up into two very broad categories. Completely ignorant of mandarin, and completely literate in mandarin. There are a lot of us here - myself included - who can pronounce mandarin given a phonetic rendering of it, but may not know the characters used. There’s no reason not to include tone marks.
I find myself all the time knowing the sound of something but not the tones, because it’s never written with the tones. I can’t conjure them out of thin air.
The simple fact is you can’t convey the sound adequately and efficiently with the Roman alphabet no matter what you try. It’s hopeless.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Yale romanisation is pretty damn good on this account. And even an inferior romanisation system like hanyu pinyin or wade giles as better than none at all.
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[quote=“monkey_yuan, post:26, topic:160816, full:true”]
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.[/quote]
Totally. Neutral makes a much better enemy than perfect. 
I resisted learning those damn characters for the longest time because… ew. But I bowed to reality in the end.
What a beautiful world it would be if everyone just spoke English. Or Esperanto. Esperanto would do nicely.
Agreed. No version of pinyin can give you accurate pronunciation. BPMF with tone marks is the only way.
But pinyin with tone marks is surely better than pinyin without tone marks for accurate pronunciation, right?
(And it absolutely can give you accurate pronunciation if you already know the pinyin in question)
The amount of characters I know always lags behind the amount of words I know, because I speak much more than I write.
Again I’d say that’s fairly normal.
I think it used to be [K] for [G] in English and [K’] for [K], some brilliant mind decided to get rid of all the [’], so a word name like [Beiping] in Hanyu Pinyun would have been [Peip’ing] in Wade Giles. At least there was a differentiation before.
This has been discussed over and over before. Would make sense to change all names to one system, especially Tamsui and Keelung (what’s wrong with northern harbors?), but changing long-established names like Kaohsiung would be a costly pain in the butt for many people.
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Blasphemy!!
Also I think you’ll find over a billion people across the water who derive massive benefit from Romanization. Without it they couldn’t post on social media for starters.
Tamsui and Keelung are both romanisations of hokkien not mando though.
Which goes with my theory that Wade and Giles learned bastardized Mandarin from the Hokkien speakers around them! Remember where they were posted for much of their careers.
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As mentioned in previous threads on this topic, Tamsui is a historical name.
The Spanish had multiple renderings of that name as soon as they ventured out of San Salvador (Spanish fort on Heping island) sometime after 1626.
After 1630, Dominican Friar Jacinto Esquivel wrote two dictionary for Tamsui 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.”
Other renderings include the Spanish’s Tanchui, Tamsui, Dutch’s various renderings, Tamsuy, Tampsui, and Tamsay.
The person that really cemented the Tamsui spelling was George Leslie Mackay, who wrote extensively about the town in his book “From Far Formosa”
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Fine with me, as long as every other place name in Taiwan is romanized according to hokkien, hoklo, or whatever… too. The inconsistency is what drives me up the tree every time I encounter this question.
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Right, tell me that again when San Jose and Albuquerque are spelt as San Hosay and Alberkerkey.
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Actually, that should be San Hozay. 
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Who put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp
Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong
Who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop
Who put the dip in the dip da dip da dip
Who was that man
I’d like to shake his hand
He made my baby fall in love with me (yeah)
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