Lesson 3a: romanization.
Mar. 16th, 2002 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynEvening, folks. We're not doing history tonight. Tonight I'm gonna attempt the best explanation I can manage of a topic that drove me stark raving bugnuts for a while when I first started developing this case of rampant Sinophilia: the conversion from Chinese written ideograms to the phonetic alphabet we know and love, aka the process of romanization. I freely admit it's something of a detour, but it puzzled me a great deal when I first encountered discrepancies between the names Barry Hughart had for historical figures, and the names I turned up in the library...
Disclaimer here: Not a linguist. Not a Chinese speaker. Not even able to write the language beyond the characters for 'computer', 'horse', and 'patience', and maybe a few food terms. (Long story.) You get the idea.
The Chinese system of writing, like we said a few posts ago, was designed to encode meaning rather than phonetics. True, a lot of characters include elements that are there as pronunciation guides, but that's not the same thing. There's thousands upon thousands of characters in written Chinese - to the best of my knowledge, somewhere close to forty thousand. You need to know roughly three to four thousand to be reasonably literate. It's a time consuming process and there's not much cure for it but memorization. Each character represents one syllable's worth of ideas, but the only way to know what it sounds like is to engrave it in your memory.
The Roman alphabet - the one used for the English language - is a set of characters used to encode spoken sound. There are, I believe, forty-four phonemes in the standard spoken English language. Each letter might indicate a single phoneme, or might be part of another, larger phoneme, and the only way to know what the whole mess means is to 'sound it out' until the spoken word corresponds to the meaning in your memory.
I think you begin to see the problem.
Serious suggestions have been made in the past about switching Chinese writing over to an alphabetic script. The most recent go-round of this came in the 1920s and 1930s, to the best of my knowledge - it was part of the whole rush to join up with the modern world. While it would certainly have made printing easier, since you'd only have to have one print element for each of a limited set of sounds rather than enough print elements to cover an ENTIRE LANGUAGE'S VOCABULARY, the idea was ultimately tossed. The country has, literally, hundreds of dialects. Many of them are fundamentally incompatible with each other in spoken form, but each and every one relies on the same written form. Taking the ideographic script away and replacing it with a written alphabet would mean that people in, say, Shanghai no longer wrote the same language with people in Hong Kong, let alone people way out west in Uighur territory. It would essentially mean kicking the struts out from under the entire population in terms of maintaining national unity. Didn't fly. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the People's Republic of China moved to simplify the written characters, figuring this would make them easier to learn. (This didn't happen in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for obvious reasons.) They also came up with an official way of rendering the sounds of Chinese into the Roman alphabet, called Pinyin. The idea there was to make it easier to teach correct pronunciation, not to replace the character script.
Now, under normal circumstances, this would've been great. "Look, Ma! A system of writing a foreign language in an at least marginally familiar form, created by actual speakers of the language! We can finally spell their words consistently and well, and we'll know we're getting it right, because it's the way they would do it!" Lovely thought, honestly, except for one tiny problem... there was already a system in use for doing this exact thing.
Wayyyyyy back in the beginnings of serious contact between China and the west, efforts had been made to render the sounds of the language accurately. There were quite a few of these systems floating around, including one put together in 1815 by a priest named Morrison. Morrison's system caught the attention of Thomas Wade, the Chinese language secretary to the British embassy in China, and in 1867 Wade sat down and wrote out a book called "Teach Yourself Chinese". The book included his adaptation of Morrison's system. Wade was apparently sufficiently popular that forty-five years after the fact, H. A. Giles picked up his system, made a few slight modifications to it, and published a Chinese English Dictionary. BAM, we have the Wade-Giles system of romanization.
Wish I knew why it's not capitalized, but I'm not gonna argue.
Anyway, Wade-Giles was already being used in an awful lot of places, like on maps, and in books, and in universities and other places of study the world over. Pinyin got adapted in a big fat hairy hurry within China itself because, well, the government said so, dammit. The rest of the world took a while longer. Some users didn't change which system they were relying on at all. Neither Taiwan nor Hong Kong was exactly in the mood to listen to the words of the mainland, which meant that a lot of folks in other parts of the world didn't bother listening either, since that would've meant having to pick up another way of spelling things. It's one thing to switch from writing 'Peking' to 'Beijing' on your maps, and quite another to change all the terms and phrases in your monographs, essays, and texts.
(Bear in mind, now, that these are just TWO of the systems that were ever used and that are still in use today. There's at least four others, most notably Yale, which was created in 1948 to make teaching the US military a simpler matter, and Gwoyeu Romatzyh, created in 1928 to spell out the different tones that distinguish one word from another.)
The point of all this is that both systems of rendering Chinese pronunciation into the English alphabet still have a powerful hold in various arenas, regardless of what the official standard is. (Pinyin, for the record.) I was unaware of this when I first started getting really interested in Chinese history and culture. I knew that the Chinese capital city had been called Peking for years, but was supposed to be called Beijing now. Didn't know why, assumed it was part of the same worldwide surge towards renaming cities and countries that had turned Dutch Guiana into Suriname and Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. I would say 'go ahead and laugh', but at the time I was all of fourteen or fifteen years old. I honestly didn't know better. At the time, I had a tendency to pull a book at random from the science fiction/fantasy section of the New Books shelf pretty much every time I went to the library. One week a bright yellow dust jacket caught my eye. Something called The Story Of The Stone, which promised 'an ancient China that never was'. Ooo, promising...
I took it home, and I read it, and I reread it, and I racked up a hell of an overdue fine on it. Barry Hughart used the Wade-Giles system. His spellings were my first real exposure to Chinese words or names rendered into English. When, years later, Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe 2 hit the market, Gonick also used Wade-Giles. Gonick took huge chunks of his Chinese history from a volume by a man whose name I recognized. The Story of the Stone had repeatedly mentioned the great historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and here was all this lovely stuff he'd written, being referenced thousands of years later! This was fantastic! I had to find his book somewhere and read it myself!
How was I supposed to know the bastard wasn't gonna be found under any spelling other than 'Sima Qian'? Thank you SO much, guys.
Eventually I realized there were different ways of spelling Chinese words, but I had no idea which spellings were supposed to be used with each other. Transliterating Chinese wasn't high on my list of priorities at the time. Ultimately, though, I got things cleared up - ultimately. As in, oooh, roughly a year ago. Not until AFTER I had named my American-born Chinese Akashic Brother character in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cadhla's Mage game. By the time I realized I was using a spelling that no longer really conformed with much of anything in the way of 'official' documents or easily available dictionaries or texts, it was too late. The name had been established using a Wade-Giles spelling, and trying to change the spelling to something more accurate would've just made a mess with the other characters. The rest of his family got Pinyin. I haven't bothered trying to explain this IC'ly, mostly because, well, nobody else seems to have noticed.
Gonna notice now, though. See, some spellings only exist in one romanization system or the other. We'll use my poor schlub of a Mage to demonstrate. His name, as I've been rendering it, is Hsiang Ho. The 'hs' at the start of the surname syllable is a dead giveaway. The official Pinyin system doesn't include that spelling anywhere. You can't start a Pinyin syllable with 'hs' or 'ts', they're not on the list of official possible spellings. The appropriate spelling of his family name would actually be Xiang. Pinyin eliminated a lot of confusion that arose out of a somewhat limited choice of sounds in Wade-Giles. That X at the start of Ho's family name is unique to the Pinyin system. So are any syllables that start with B, D, G, Q, or Z. Just not gonna happen if you're using the Wade-Giles rules. Q represents a lot of the 'ch' sounds, as in Sima Qian's personal name and as in Qin Shihuangdi, the first real Emperor of China, and even as in the last Imperial dynasty before the revolution, the Qing. X covers anything that started with an 'hs' under Wade-Giles - Xiang instead of Hsiang, for example. Or, to go back to the last post, Xia instead of Hsia, the dynasty founded by Emperor Yu.
Other distinguishing points include syllable endings. If the word terminates in the letters 'ung', 'ueh', 'ieh', 'en', or 'ien', your author is almost certainly using Wade-Giles. If they're using Pinyin, they'd have used 'ong', 'ue', 'ie', 'an', or 'ian' instead. There's a lot of other differences, too. For example, there's a lot more apostrophes in the Wade-Giles system (although they're not really apostrophes, but I don't know the difference), and a lot more umlauts. Wade-Giles allows for pretty liberal use of the hyphen (Ssu-ma, remember?) in multi-syllable words, but you don't see it in Pinyin. A name completely broken down into three separate words for three separate syllables is probably being rendered under Wade-Giles, though not necessarily; Pinyin allows you to join certain syllables together (i.e., Mao Zedong instead of Mao Tse Tung).
Even some of the vowels are rendered differently. The o in my Akashic's personal name is one such case, as the newer system renders that sound with the letter 'e' instaed. Given that there was a brief spate of dwarf jokes ("Hi, Ho!") when I started playing him, I didn't want to change the spelling to the more 'official' one and go through more of that kind of thing. Especially not since one of the other characters tends to greet people with 'Hey, Doc' or 'Hey, Janey' or something of that sort. 'Hey, He' just didn't seem like it was in the cards. Nevertheless, since everyone else in the family uses the Pinyin system for their names, Hsiang Ho's diploma from Johnson and Wales University almost certainly reads 'Xiang He' instead.
If you want more gory details, you can always stop by one of the following places. God knows these folks are infinitely better choices than me. They're real linguists. I'm just in this for my own entertainment.
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/difference.html
http://www.wlu.edu/~hhill/tlit.html
http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter_old.html - This one's neat. It lets you type in a word in one of the romanization systems and click on a button to see it in one of the others. For some reason the last option on the list is 'French'. I'm not sure I want to know about that.
Thanks for putting up with the digression. Hopefully next time there'll be some proper history, but at least now you know more than I did when I started out with this whole sorry mess.
Disclaimer here: Not a linguist. Not a Chinese speaker. Not even able to write the language beyond the characters for 'computer', 'horse', and 'patience', and maybe a few food terms. (Long story.) You get the idea.
The Chinese system of writing, like we said a few posts ago, was designed to encode meaning rather than phonetics. True, a lot of characters include elements that are there as pronunciation guides, but that's not the same thing. There's thousands upon thousands of characters in written Chinese - to the best of my knowledge, somewhere close to forty thousand. You need to know roughly three to four thousand to be reasonably literate. It's a time consuming process and there's not much cure for it but memorization. Each character represents one syllable's worth of ideas, but the only way to know what it sounds like is to engrave it in your memory.
The Roman alphabet - the one used for the English language - is a set of characters used to encode spoken sound. There are, I believe, forty-four phonemes in the standard spoken English language. Each letter might indicate a single phoneme, or might be part of another, larger phoneme, and the only way to know what the whole mess means is to 'sound it out' until the spoken word corresponds to the meaning in your memory.
I think you begin to see the problem.
Serious suggestions have been made in the past about switching Chinese writing over to an alphabetic script. The most recent go-round of this came in the 1920s and 1930s, to the best of my knowledge - it was part of the whole rush to join up with the modern world. While it would certainly have made printing easier, since you'd only have to have one print element for each of a limited set of sounds rather than enough print elements to cover an ENTIRE LANGUAGE'S VOCABULARY, the idea was ultimately tossed. The country has, literally, hundreds of dialects. Many of them are fundamentally incompatible with each other in spoken form, but each and every one relies on the same written form. Taking the ideographic script away and replacing it with a written alphabet would mean that people in, say, Shanghai no longer wrote the same language with people in Hong Kong, let alone people way out west in Uighur territory. It would essentially mean kicking the struts out from under the entire population in terms of maintaining national unity. Didn't fly. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the People's Republic of China moved to simplify the written characters, figuring this would make them easier to learn. (This didn't happen in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for obvious reasons.) They also came up with an official way of rendering the sounds of Chinese into the Roman alphabet, called Pinyin. The idea there was to make it easier to teach correct pronunciation, not to replace the character script.
Now, under normal circumstances, this would've been great. "Look, Ma! A system of writing a foreign language in an at least marginally familiar form, created by actual speakers of the language! We can finally spell their words consistently and well, and we'll know we're getting it right, because it's the way they would do it!" Lovely thought, honestly, except for one tiny problem... there was already a system in use for doing this exact thing.
Wayyyyyy back in the beginnings of serious contact between China and the west, efforts had been made to render the sounds of the language accurately. There were quite a few of these systems floating around, including one put together in 1815 by a priest named Morrison. Morrison's system caught the attention of Thomas Wade, the Chinese language secretary to the British embassy in China, and in 1867 Wade sat down and wrote out a book called "Teach Yourself Chinese". The book included his adaptation of Morrison's system. Wade was apparently sufficiently popular that forty-five years after the fact, H. A. Giles picked up his system, made a few slight modifications to it, and published a Chinese English Dictionary. BAM, we have the Wade-Giles system of romanization.
Wish I knew why it's not capitalized, but I'm not gonna argue.
Anyway, Wade-Giles was already being used in an awful lot of places, like on maps, and in books, and in universities and other places of study the world over. Pinyin got adapted in a big fat hairy hurry within China itself because, well, the government said so, dammit. The rest of the world took a while longer. Some users didn't change which system they were relying on at all. Neither Taiwan nor Hong Kong was exactly in the mood to listen to the words of the mainland, which meant that a lot of folks in other parts of the world didn't bother listening either, since that would've meant having to pick up another way of spelling things. It's one thing to switch from writing 'Peking' to 'Beijing' on your maps, and quite another to change all the terms and phrases in your monographs, essays, and texts.
(Bear in mind, now, that these are just TWO of the systems that were ever used and that are still in use today. There's at least four others, most notably Yale, which was created in 1948 to make teaching the US military a simpler matter, and Gwoyeu Romatzyh, created in 1928 to spell out the different tones that distinguish one word from another.)
The point of all this is that both systems of rendering Chinese pronunciation into the English alphabet still have a powerful hold in various arenas, regardless of what the official standard is. (Pinyin, for the record.) I was unaware of this when I first started getting really interested in Chinese history and culture. I knew that the Chinese capital city had been called Peking for years, but was supposed to be called Beijing now. Didn't know why, assumed it was part of the same worldwide surge towards renaming cities and countries that had turned Dutch Guiana into Suriname and Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. I would say 'go ahead and laugh', but at the time I was all of fourteen or fifteen years old. I honestly didn't know better. At the time, I had a tendency to pull a book at random from the science fiction/fantasy section of the New Books shelf pretty much every time I went to the library. One week a bright yellow dust jacket caught my eye. Something called The Story Of The Stone, which promised 'an ancient China that never was'. Ooo, promising...
I took it home, and I read it, and I reread it, and I racked up a hell of an overdue fine on it. Barry Hughart used the Wade-Giles system. His spellings were my first real exposure to Chinese words or names rendered into English. When, years later, Larry Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe 2 hit the market, Gonick also used Wade-Giles. Gonick took huge chunks of his Chinese history from a volume by a man whose name I recognized. The Story of the Stone had repeatedly mentioned the great historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and here was all this lovely stuff he'd written, being referenced thousands of years later! This was fantastic! I had to find his book somewhere and read it myself!
How was I supposed to know the bastard wasn't gonna be found under any spelling other than 'Sima Qian'? Thank you SO much, guys.
Eventually I realized there were different ways of spelling Chinese words, but I had no idea which spellings were supposed to be used with each other. Transliterating Chinese wasn't high on my list of priorities at the time. Ultimately, though, I got things cleared up - ultimately. As in, oooh, roughly a year ago. Not until AFTER I had named my American-born Chinese Akashic Brother character in
cadhla's Mage game. By the time I realized I was using a spelling that no longer really conformed with much of anything in the way of 'official' documents or easily available dictionaries or texts, it was too late. The name had been established using a Wade-Giles spelling, and trying to change the spelling to something more accurate would've just made a mess with the other characters. The rest of his family got Pinyin. I haven't bothered trying to explain this IC'ly, mostly because, well, nobody else seems to have noticed.Gonna notice now, though. See, some spellings only exist in one romanization system or the other. We'll use my poor schlub of a Mage to demonstrate. His name, as I've been rendering it, is Hsiang Ho. The 'hs' at the start of the surname syllable is a dead giveaway. The official Pinyin system doesn't include that spelling anywhere. You can't start a Pinyin syllable with 'hs' or 'ts', they're not on the list of official possible spellings. The appropriate spelling of his family name would actually be Xiang. Pinyin eliminated a lot of confusion that arose out of a somewhat limited choice of sounds in Wade-Giles. That X at the start of Ho's family name is unique to the Pinyin system. So are any syllables that start with B, D, G, Q, or Z. Just not gonna happen if you're using the Wade-Giles rules. Q represents a lot of the 'ch' sounds, as in Sima Qian's personal name and as in Qin Shihuangdi, the first real Emperor of China, and even as in the last Imperial dynasty before the revolution, the Qing. X covers anything that started with an 'hs' under Wade-Giles - Xiang instead of Hsiang, for example. Or, to go back to the last post, Xia instead of Hsia, the dynasty founded by Emperor Yu.
Other distinguishing points include syllable endings. If the word terminates in the letters 'ung', 'ueh', 'ieh', 'en', or 'ien', your author is almost certainly using Wade-Giles. If they're using Pinyin, they'd have used 'ong', 'ue', 'ie', 'an', or 'ian' instead. There's a lot of other differences, too. For example, there's a lot more apostrophes in the Wade-Giles system (although they're not really apostrophes, but I don't know the difference), and a lot more umlauts. Wade-Giles allows for pretty liberal use of the hyphen (Ssu-ma, remember?) in multi-syllable words, but you don't see it in Pinyin. A name completely broken down into three separate words for three separate syllables is probably being rendered under Wade-Giles, though not necessarily; Pinyin allows you to join certain syllables together (i.e., Mao Zedong instead of Mao Tse Tung).
Even some of the vowels are rendered differently. The o in my Akashic's personal name is one such case, as the newer system renders that sound with the letter 'e' instaed. Given that there was a brief spate of dwarf jokes ("Hi, Ho!") when I started playing him, I didn't want to change the spelling to the more 'official' one and go through more of that kind of thing. Especially not since one of the other characters tends to greet people with 'Hey, Doc' or 'Hey, Janey' or something of that sort. 'Hey, He' just didn't seem like it was in the cards. Nevertheless, since everyone else in the family uses the Pinyin system for their names, Hsiang Ho's diploma from Johnson and Wales University almost certainly reads 'Xiang He' instead.
If you want more gory details, you can always stop by one of the following places. God knows these folks are infinitely better choices than me. They're real linguists. I'm just in this for my own entertainment.
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/difference.html
http://www.wlu.edu/~hhill/tlit.html
http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter_old.html - This one's neat. It lets you type in a word in one of the romanization systems and click on a button to see it in one of the others. For some reason the last option on the list is 'French'. I'm not sure I want to know about that.
Thanks for putting up with the digression. Hopefully next time there'll be some proper history, but at least now you know more than I did when I started out with this whole sorry mess.
no subject
Date: 2002-03-16 06:53 am (UTC)