Other transliteration systems?

[Bob161]

Perhaps I'll be more careful how I word my quips in the future.

That being said, for my part, I think the pinyin system is a fine piece of work. It's been a big help to me and has no more or worse idiosyncrasies than any other system that is designed to do what it does. This especially considering the fact that the learning curve is pretty shallow relative to the other systems.

It was helpful for me to see the other methods, however, even if I don't have to use them.

[crazy-meiguoren]

Pinyin works for me. I haven't been taught other transliteration systems, so I really can't say "this is better than that". It makes sense that the Germans would build a transliteration system suitable for German speakers. Not all aspects of a language convert easily from one system to another. Pinyin does it pretty well for the most part. That's my own opinyin, though.

[atitarev]

It makes sense that the Germans would build a transliteration system suitable for German speakers.

Pinyin is international but there are also historical names (like in English). Some languages use some transliteration methods more over pinyin than others when transcribing Chinese names. New or rare Chinese names are generally written in Pinyin in many Roman-based languages. As a learning tool it's even used in the countries where a non-Roman scripts are used like Japan or Russia.

[Jose]

You could claim that Yale is easier for an untrained speaker of English, but it lacks the writing economy and correspondence to initials and finals of Pinyin

The layout of the phonemic system of initials and finals of Mandarin is controversial in itself, and there have been different approaches to what is regarded as phonemic and what is regarded as allophonic in the Mandarin sound system. In this respect, different systems actually result in differing sets of initials and finals.

Regarding my previous comment that there are some aspects where I think Yale is better than pinyin, I can think of three points I like about Yale in comparison with pinyin:

1. There are no spelling rules that modify the aspect of a final when combined with a consonant, so we have "yan" and "byan", "you" and "lyou" and so on. I like the simplicity of this.

2. It doesn't differentiate the series "bwo", "pwo", "mwo" "fwo" from the ones with the rest of the consonants: "nwo", "two", "dwo", etc.

3. It doesn't give phonemic status to pinyin j, q and x. This point, together with 2, means that the Yale system offers a more compact (i. e. efficient) table of sounds for Mandarin Chinese. Many of the differences that appear to be phonemic in hanyu pinyin can be treated as allophonic).

Points 2 and 3 address the phonemic system. Whenever I've mentioned this in the past, nobody seems to agree with me on this, but note that the table of Mandarin initials and finals becomes much more compact if you remove the -o row and the j-, -q-, x- columns. The -o cells can be moved to the corresponding empty -uo cells, while the j-, q-, x- cells can be moved to either zh-, ch- and sh- (as Gwoyeu Romatzyh does) or to g-, k-, h-. It is precisely because of the phonetic merger of such pairs as kin/chin and sin/hin in 19th century Beijing Mandarin that the j, q and x sounds have posed a bit of a problem for designers of phonetic systems of Chinese (I think Norman or Ramsey mentions this; I haven't got those books at hand now).

I have always used pinyin and it is the only system I am comfortable with, so I am not advocating the use of Yale or Wade-Giles or any other obsolete system. But I think we use pinyin simply because it is the system that the Chinese government has been promoting during the last 50 years, not because it has proved to be superior to the other systems. While arguing about which system we as learners should use is plain stupid (If you study Chinese, pinyin is the one to use, period), I still feel that it is not fair to evaluate the other systems by judging how much they deviate from pinyin. If you do that, pinyin will always win hands down by sheer definition.

[renzhe]

Interesting comments, thanks.

Is there any linguistic reason for looking at j/zh and q/ch as allophones (did they split from the same initial), or is the reasoning simply that it makes the tables neater? They seem to be produced very differently and are never interchangeable by native speakers.

[Shi Tong]

Facinating set of different translitteration schemes there Renzhe/ Chrix, thanks for listing these out.

I've always said that there is no perfect translitteration scheme for any language, but as we've previously discussed, pinyin is a very good one, and the arguments for it are numerous and certainly hold a lot of water.

[Bob161]

stumbled across this French system when I was looking up Tsingtao Beer

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_fran%C3%A7aise_d'Extr%C3%AAme-Orient

[Jose]

renzhe,

Sorry for the late reply. I recently came to China and I've been unable to connect to the Internet regularly. I hope to be more active on the forums from now on.

The main reason why I dislike the phonemic treatment of x, j and q is the structural redundancy in phonemes that I see in the usual table of initials and finals. I think that's a linguistically sound argument, regardless of etymology. There is also, however, a (sort of) historical argument in favour of the idea that the pinyin/bopomofo consonants are too many.

First, from a formal point of view, my dislike for regarding x, j and q as phonemes is mainly based on the absence of minimal pairs (apparent cases like xu v. (s)(h)u or ji v. z(h)i are not real minimal pairs since the vowels are different). I wrote a couple of long posts in the past (here) where I tried to explain my view on this. The fact that that many romanisation systems have eliminated these sounds from the basic phonemes of Mandarin lends support to the view that such an approach is sensible. Apart from Yale and, partially, Wade-Giles, this also includes systems completely devised by Chinese people, like Gwoyeu Romatzyh, which was mainly developed by the great linguist Y. R. Chao.

As I mentioned above, Jerry Norman mentions the controversy surrounding the treatment of j, q and x. I don't have the book with me, but luckily, the relevant pages (140 and 141) can be found on Google Books (link). Norman says:

3. Phonemic status of the palatals. Most of the consonants described above contrast phonemically with one another. The palatals, however, are in complementary distribution with three different series: the dental sibilants, the retroflexes and the velars. The latter three series never occur before high front vowels (i and ü), whereas the palatals are found only in this position. This has posed one of the classic problems of phonemic analysis. Hartman (1944) and Hockett (1947) interpreted the palatals as allophones of the dental sibilants before palatal semivowels; Martin (1957) considered the palatals to be allophones of the velar series of initials, an interpretation which Chao considers closest to the "feeling of the native" (1968, 21).

Most romanizations of Chinese which have been devised for English-speaking students have placed the palatals together with the retroflexes, presumably because the two series sound very close to the average speaker of English. The official pīnyīn system (as well as the older zhùyīn fúhào alphabet) retains the palatals as a separate series.

Jerry Norman, Chinese (pp. 140, 141)

As for the historical arguments, I'm no expert on this but I think most Chinese dialects make a distinction between a k-like consonant in 江 and a ch-like consonant in 將. Similarly, 星 in such dialects is pronounced with an s-like consonant while 行 is pronounced with an h-like consonant. This can be seen in the old style, "postal" spellings of Chinese place names like "Peking", "Heilungkiang" or "Sinkiang", as opposed to, say, "Tientsin" and "Tsinan"; and in other old-style spellings like "Emperor K'ang-hi" or "Tao Te King". In the dialects that haven't had this sort of phonetic merger, it makes sense to analyse 行 as hing, and then 星 as sing. It's not really necessary to introduce new initial consonants for these sounds (even though there doesn't seem to be a sing v. shing distinction in the older pronunciation either). Thomas Wade was surely aware of this distinction in the more conservative dialects, including the official 正音 pronunciation, which may have been the reason why he chose the hs spelling for the merged sound in Beijing Mandarin, so that both 行 and 星 became hsing in his Pekingese Syllabary of 1859.

I think this phonetic merger is the reason why it is difficult to decide where to put syllables like xi, ji, qi in a transcription system of modern Mandarin. Since at the time Wade wrote his Pekingese Syllabary, pairs such as hing and sing had already become undistinguishable in the Beijing dialect, the case was equally valid for spelling all of them as either hing or sing. Wade opted for introducing a new "hs" for the h and s merger, while he simply got rid of ki, kü, k'i and k'ü, chucking all those syllables into the chi ch'i, chü, ch'ü groups. The bopomofo system opted for assigning three different consonant symbols to the merged consonant sounds of the Northern colloquial language, while Chao's Gwoyeu Romatzyh system removed them completely, and hanyu pinyin, being largely based on bopomofo, restored them as separate consonants.

[renzhe]

This is very interesting stuff. Thanks for the detailed answer.

[Jose]

While searching for information about the chiang-kiang merger in the Mandarin dialects, I have found a very interesting document in the web which I think is relevant for this thread. It is an article by the Dutch sinologist Gustaaf Schlegel published in the year 1895. It seems that the growing adoption of the Wade system for the general transcription of Chinese names was controversial at the end of the 19th century. Since this was before the 白話 movement, there was still reluctance among Western scholars to use Peking-based spellings for the transcription of Chinese names. This must be the reason why spellings like Tao Te King or K'ang-hi, based on the 正音 pronunciation, were still preferred in early 20th century literature about China.

Schlegel, citing the English scholar Mayers, rants against the tendency in Western sinological works to adopt the Wade system based on "the bad, half-Manchurian pronunciation" of Peking (link).

None of the elder Sinologues, Morrison, Medhurst, Bridgman, Mayers, Stanislas Julien, Rémusat, Gaubil, only to name some of the most renowned, who have been living either in Canton, Batavia, Peking, Amoy or Europe, have used for the transcription of Chinese characters and names the local brogue of the place where they were living and studying; all of them have used the standard pronunciation in their transcriptions, and we do not see why the present generation should adopt the local brogue of Peking as the standard pronunciation for the whole Chinese language. It may be in vogue at the rotten and tattering court of the decrepit Manchu dynasty reeling upon its worm-eaten throne, but this is no reason for us, Europeans, to become tainted with such a bad habit.

Gustaaf Schlegel On the extended use of the Peking system of ortography for the Chinese language, 1895

It seems that heated and passionate discussions about transcription systems have been going on for more than 100 years.

[JenniferW]

My main problem with pīnyīn is when it's written with no tone marks - which is what happens for street signs. Even now that I can read most of the characters in street signs, when there's one with a character I don't know, so I need the pīnyīn, it really annoys me that there's no tone mark. I can't imagine languages like French, or German, which use diacritics would knock them out systematically in this way.

The only other annoying problem I've had is its influence on Chinese students learning English. When they learn pīnyīn, they never seem to learn the rules for the use of upper case letters (which are there in dictionaries such as the 新华字典), and I think from talking with university level students, don't ever actually get taught them. So when they then start to use what seems the same system to them, for writing English, you get an absence of upper case letters.

[jbradfor]

My main problem with pīnyīn is when it's written with no tone marks - which is what happens for street signs.

This is true of pretty much every romanization system, except the very few that have different spellings for the different tones, such as Gwoyeu Romatzyh. And, after looking at the rules, I think I can I prefer dropping the tone marks on street signs.

[Shi Tong]

Jen, you think they're annoying without the tone marks.. try looking at them in Taiwan.. seems like they just decide on how to write something and write it regardless of how it looks.

Really annoying.

I dont see why it's so hard to write the pinyin marks on street signs though, TBH.