Do you find Wale-Giles more intuitive?

[imron]

If you are English and in an English-speaking country talking to native English speakers with no connection with Chinese or China, would you say:

Definitely the middle one. Beijing with a j as in jingle.

[liuzhou]

You should broaden the range of Chinese persons that you speak to normally.

I'm devastated to learn that my social circle is deficient, but I suppose it's to be expected of us country bumpkins.

Purely by coincidence, I found myself at a banquet last night where one Chinese guest was a graduate of the university in question. She was asked, In English, where she had studied. She replied in her excellent English that she had done her BA in Guangxi University, then her MA in 北大. Seeing the look of confusion or incomprehension on the questioners face, she corrected herself - "Sorry, Beijing University."

No one could work out what I was giggling at over my chicken's feet and duck gizzard.

As to Tsingtao, I recall reading that the beer company was given special dispensation and not forced to switch to Pinyin for its name as it was already well-known internationally and changing the name might have harmed the brand's marketing. Kweichow Moutai was also given dispensation for the same reason.

Anyway, I'm off to look for a piece of straw to chew on while I muck out the pigs.

[Demonic_Duck]

Okay this one's more tricky. If you are English and in an English-speaking country talking to native English speakers with no connection with Chinese or China, would you say:

- Tomorrow I'm going to Beijing (pronouncing the "j" as ʒ, like the middle of "leisure"; no tones)

- Tomorrow I'm going to Beijing (pronouncing the "j" as standard in Chinese but without tones)

- Tomorrow I'm going to Běijīng (pronounced as Standard Chinese)

Personally I think pronouncing the tones sounds a bit daft.

Well, the first just seems plain incorrect, and makes no sense in either English or Chinese phonology. I have no idea why people do this, and it mildly irritates me. Personally, I'd normally go with the third, unless it messes up the natural intonation of my sentence, in which case I do the second. For people who have no knowledge of Chinese, I'd suggest a fourth option, simply pronounce the "j" as a normal English "j" sound, as in "jump", so it would be /beɪˈdʒɪŋ/.

[Lu]

Okay this one's more tricky. If you are English and in an English-speaking country talking to native English speakers with no connection with Chinese or China' date=' would you say:

- Tomorrow I'm going to Beijing (pronouncing the "j" as ʒ, like the middle of "leisure"; no tones)

- Tomorrow I'm going to Beijing (pronouncing the "j" as standard in Chinese but without tones)

- Tomorrow I'm going to Běijīng (pronounced as Standard Chinese)

Personally I think pronouncing the tones sounds a bit daft.[/quote']I'd go with the second option, while paying as much attention to the tones as I could without sounding daft. Ignoring the tones altogether would grate too, way back when I heard an American talk about his friend at 'Bèida' and that just sounded wrong. But I have to admit that on occasion I still say Peking when speaking Dutch when that seems to fit better.

[c_redman]

Wade-Giles isn't intuitive to me. Using p, t, k, ts, and ch to represent b, d, g, z and j/zh means that nobody will pronounce words remotely accurately without learning the system. Even after learning what they symbolize, I still need to mentally convert them when seeing them, because the English pronunciation is so ingrained. I'm sure that after learning it, it's no worse than any other system, but it's not helpful for beginners.

The other problem is that apostrophes are a vital part of the representation, so that p', t', k', and ch' represent p, t, k, and ch/q. However, writers unfamiliar with the system, or just lazy, will just leave them out. This makes the representation of the words wrong.

With pinyin, at least you can come close, although it's necessary to know that x, c, and q are special.

I think you are wrong. Wade-Giles is only now hung on to by Americans and a few ancient others.

Americans don't use Wade-Giles more than anyone else; i.e., it's for older books, historical names too ingrained to change, and signs in older Chinatowns.

[c_redman]

Out of curiousity, I did some digging. Historical place names are often from the Qing dynasty postal codes, which are based on Wade-Giles with some historical exceptions and systematic romanization changes. Thus, Beijing/Pei-ching is Peking, Chongqing/Ch'ung-ch'ing is Chungking, and Guizhou/Kuei-chou is Kweichow. It also seems to be Tsingtao for Qingdao (but I haven't found the full list to verify it), although on another page Wikipedia claims it originates from the French EFEO romanization.

[renzhe]

As to Tsingtao, I recall reading that the beer company was given special dispensation and not forced to switch to Pinyin for its name as it was already well-known internationally and changing the name might have harmed the brand's marketing. Kweichow Moutai was also given dispensation for the same reason.

Another two names that were explicitly given exemption were Peking University and Tsinghua University ;)

[liuzhou]

Another two names that were explicitly given exemption were Peking University and Tsinghua University ;)

If so, and unlike Tsingtao and Moutai their acceptance is clearly not universal, they are still anomalies. So where does that leave us?

Wade-Giles is as good as dead.

[renzhe]

As for universal acceptance, I have never in my life seen 清华 written as Qinghua. I think that this is very much universal. I've never seen 北大 written as "Beijing University" in any official document either, but I will believe you that it may be acceptable in some contexts. They simply have an official English romanisation which predates Pinyin.

I agree, though, that Wade-Giles is as good as dead, as are all romanisation methods which are not pinyin. Learning them can be fun as a hobby, after you have mastered Hanyu Pinyin, but they are not a replacement in this day and age.

[Guest realmayo]

I'm devastated to learn that my social circle is deficient, but I suppose it's to be expected of us country bumpkins.

Luizhou: I think it might be the reverse. At least one of the people I remember saying "Peking University" could never have realistically hoped to study there: if it was an affectation, it was an earnest attempt to show off some small erudition to an English-speaking foreigner. The people you talk to must be way too urbane & sophisticated. Or, maybe it just hasn't come up in enough conversations for you to hear it.

As for Beijing hard/soft "j", my own recent affectation is to go with the common English version of a soft "j". This is because I caught myself once saying "Shanghai" full-on putonhua style in a conversation in English in England and I thought I sounded silly.

[Guest realmayo]

To the OP: for "intuitive", I think you really have to ask people who have only just started Chinese. I learned pinyin a while ago and so the letters used seem quite normal to me. There's an (old?) joke (I think) about Chinese people visiting the US and seeing road signs indicating a pedestrian crossing, shortened to PED XING, and the Chinese people think XING = the pinyin for 行 = walk .... and think how considerate the Americans are for translating the sign into Chinese.

[Angelina]

Gwoyeu romatzyh for learning how to pronounce words in Mandarin, pinyin for everything else.

[Kobo-Daishi]

The above is from the preface to The Cambridge History of China: Volume 7. The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644

Part 1

Bit from the above preface snippet:

The Chinese is Romanized according to the Wade-Giles system, which for all its imperfections is employed almost universally in the serious literature on China written in English. There are a few exceptions, which are noted below.

The volume was first published in 1978.

The above is from the preface to The Cambridge History of China: Volume 10. Late Ch'ing 1800–1911

Part 1

Bit from the above preface snippet:

Historians writing about the late Ch'ing period for an English-reading audience have no choice in selecting a system of Romanization of Chinese into English. The Wade-Giles system with its unfortunate use of the apostrophe is no doubt less simple and efficient than the new pinyin system of the Peoples' Republic of China, but it is still the system used in nearly every reference work on China now available to a reader of English. From the corpus of dictionaries, bibliographies, biographical dictionaries, place-name gazetteers, maps and other research aids, the Wade-Giles system has permeated the Western literature on China too deeply to be substituted. We use it here.

The volume was first published in 1988.

There are two more volumes in the series yet to be published. Volume 2 and Volume 4. Sui and T'ang China, 589–906 AD, Part Two.

http://www.cambridge...e-history-china

I gather that they too will be in Wade-Giles. Or will they break from the rest of the series already published?

Will future editions be re-edited into Hanyu Pinyin?

Books from other academic publishers are now in pinyin.

The 6-volume series on the History of Imperial China from the Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, General Editor: Timothy Brook) mentioned in the thread titled "China History Overview Books".

http://www.chinese-f...overview-books/

The Cambridge preface is certainly down on Wade-Giles.

Is Hanyu Pinyin really better than Wade-Giles?

Purely subjective?

Kobo.

[mouse]

Last year I was in the library and came across a recent (2012, I think) complete translation of the 史记 that used Wade-Giles. Among older historians Wade-Giles still lingers. Worth remembering that a lot of the older generation of Western historians don't speak Chinese, but can only read 文言文. I remember once listening to a BBC In Our Time programme where an Oxbridge academic kept butchering the names of various historical figures.

[Lu]

Wade-Giles is as good as dead, as are all romanisation methods which are not pinyin.

This is not true. For one thing, crippled Wade-Giles is still alive and kicking in Taiwan, where nobody quite knows how to use it but they all use it anyway. It is also, and much more accurately, still used in libraries. The Chinese library in Leiden is, I believe, gradually starting to use pinyin, but because the library and the systems it uses have been around for longer than pinyin has, a lot of Wade-Giles is still used in the catalogues and therefore the users need to have a working knowledge of it too (which is partly why I had to learn it back in 2000). I can't believe Leiden is the only library using this.

And then there are some dictionaries that use it. There are probably not that many students of modern Chinese who still use Mathews, but if you're learning wenyan, you need it.

[Kobo-Daishi]

It is also, and much more accurately, still used in libraries. The Chinese library in Leiden is, I believe, gradually starting to use pinyin, but because the library and the systems it uses have been around for longer than pinyin has, a lot of Wade-Giles is still used in the catalogues and therefore the users need to have a working knowledge of it too (which is partly why I had to learn it back in 2000). I can't believe Leiden is the only library using this.

I remember when America's Library of Congress (our national library) switched from Wade-Giles to pinyin.

https://www.google.c...s switch pinyin

I tried to do a search to see how they went about it, but, it seems the Library of Congress is doing maintenance so their site will be down for the weekend.

But according to the snippet in Google, the LOC announced their plan to switch way back in 1997.

I believe most American universities followed suit shortly after as well.

Kobo.

[skylee]

but if you're learning wenyan, you need it.

I am not sure I understand this. I think people who learn wenyan should already be proficient in Chinese. They should be able to read Chinese reference books and Chinese dictionaries. No?

[mouse]

Apprently the Library of Congress input pinyin by separating every morpheme, so "pinyin" would be "pin yin". This can make it really confusing to read. Unfortunately it seems a lot of university libraries who switch to pinyin follow the LoC's method. This means when you input search terms you have to try a combination of standard pinyin, spaced "pin yin", and Wade-Giles.

[OneEye]

I am not sure I understand this. I think people who learn wenyan should already be proficient in Chinese. They should be able to read Chinese reference books and Chinese dictionaries. No?

I've been told the same thing by native speakers, but that's not usually how it happens. Taiwanese people tend to view wenyan as "very advanced Chinese," whereas non-native speakers tend to be taught as though it were a separate language (which really, it is). I've had people assume my Chinese was amazing because they saw me reading 莊子 or something.

People studying Chinese at Western universities are generally taught wenyan at the third year level at latest. Third year usually means, if they haven't spent any significant time in a Chinese-speaking environment, that they're just starting to be able to decipher (not really read) texts like you see on page 15 of this PDF (a common third year textbook). They start much earlier at some schools, especially some of the big European schools. For example, a friend of mine who studied at Oxford told me that they only started requiring modern Chinese in the past several years, and that they start on classical Chinese in their first year. I believe they start in their first year at Leiden as well.

At any rate, I personally started learning classical Chinese during my second term at the MTC here in Taipei, which probably would have put me at about the third year level at an American university. I put a significant amount of time into it, which I credit with helping me reach a higher level in modern Chinese faster than my former classmates, particularly in reading. I always tell people they should start sooner rather than later on classical Chinese if at all possible, even if it means self-studying (as I did). Especially people interested in Chinese history, literature, historical linguistics, and the like. I have a friend who has excellent Chinese but never studied classical. She started her BA in the Chinese department at 台大 last year and nearly failed all her classes because she couldn't keep up with the reading.

However, I never had to use Mathews' dictionary. By the time I was done using 文言文 textbooks for English speakers (which all used pinyin), my Chinese was good enough to use Chinese dictionaries and such. Wade-Giles is easy and important to learn, but I never had to use it while learning 文言文. It comes in handy while reading academic books in English on China and Chinese, though.

[mouse]

People studying Chinese at Western universities are generally taught wenyan at the third year level at latest. [...] They start much earlier at some schools, especially some of the big European schools. For example, a friend of mine who studied at Oxford told me that they only started requiring modern Chinese in the past several years, and that they start on classical Chinese in their first year. I believe they start in their first year at Leiden as well.

This is true. For many years Oxbridge distained spoken languages and only taught ancient texts. I once watched an interview with an Anthropologist who did Chinese at Oxford or Cambridge in the sixties and at the end of his three years suddenly realised he couldn't speak a word of Chinese.

I don't think you need Wade-Giles to learn classical. Older text books will use it, but the newer ones will stick to pinyin. I think learning Wade-Giles is nice to know, but at worst it would only be mildly inconvenient not to know it.