I’ve been doing a bit of reading on Chinese history lately and noted the differences between the Wade-Giles renderings I grew up with and the Pinyin ones in use today.
I get that Pinyin is the “official” way of Translating Chinese into English but I have to wonder how accurate it is for English speakers? I mean, take the city of Tsingtao; I understand the Pinyin rendering is “Qingdao”, which (to me, at least) approximates as “Kingdao”, which is nothing at all like “Tsingtao”.
The same thing happens for me with a lot of Chinese names and places - the Pinyin rendering doesn’t make much intuitive sense, whilst Wade-Giles at least seems to approximate something I can pronounce without too much trouble.
It’s been my understanding Wade-Giles is better for approximating Chinese pronunciations to an English speaker, but Pinyin is better for the Chinese, if that makes sense.
I figured there was a reason most official sources have switched to Pinyin (and I assume it’s not just because the Chinese government asked them to), but is Pinyin really “better” for translating Chinese into English than Wade-Giles from the point of view of a native English speaker?
who is making that claim? in any case, both forms (i’m assuming, being only familiar with Mandarin pinyin) has its own rules that would make reading it as if it’s English awkward. “Kingdao” and however you pronounce “ts” and “tao”. is “tao” really pronounced with a “t” sound when the actual sound is “d”?
There is your mistake. Pinyin is not “translating” into English or into anything. Pinyin is a Chinese system developed by the Chinese for the Chinese. It has nothing to do with English where you are entirely free to keep saying and writing Peking and Hong Kong and Canton.
Here’s my wikipedia-level understanding of Chinese romanization. But I think the basic points are good, even if the details of how to pronounce this letter or that are a little off:
Basically, if you’re pronouncing all the letters the same way you would in English words, you’re doing it wrong. Quite a few sounds in Chinese have no English equivalent, so there’s no “accurate” way to write it in “English”. The d/t thing is a good example. As I understand, it’s supposed to be an “unaspirated t”, but in English we always aspirate t’s at the start of a syllable. An unaspirated t sounds kind of like a d, but not exactly. So they pick a letter (t in Wade-Giles, d in pinyin) and you’re just supposed to know how to read it. If you’re reading it correctly, the pronunciation is exactly the same.
Sometimes, the English sounds of the letters aren’t even close to how they sound in Chinese. For instance, there are a couple of different sounds in Chinese that sound kind of like sh, so in pinyin one is represented by sh and the other by x. Normally in English x is either a ks sound or maybe a z, but they needed a way to represent the second sh and x was available, so there you go.
Chinese also has a vowel that’s roughly half way between an English long i and u sound. (Try saying ee and gradually turning it into oo.) So in pinyin it’s represented by an i, and in Wade-Giles it’s a u. It sounds bizzare to an English speaker that there could even be a sound for which neither i nor u would obviously be a closer approximation, until you realize that there’s a whole continuum of vowels and we use only a few.
I learned Chinese using pinyin and found it to be a remarkably efficient system.
As far as letters being pronounced differently than you expect, the English language is probably the worst offender that I’m familiar with. Why is the t in ‘nation’ pronounced like an sh? Why are draught and draft pronounced the same way? And ‘Leicester’ – seriously, that’s how it is pronounced?
Not only dat but note that different people and different accents will pronounce the same word differently, just like in English, so that ortography is mostly a matter of standardized convention rather than trying to reflect a specific pronunciation. In Chinese you can hear it as tofu/dofu, Qingtao/Qingdao, etc. those two letters are quite close in pronunciation, even in English and more so in Chinese.
The problem with being anglo-centric is that it gives you an extremely distorted view of the rest of the world. The rest of the world is not trying to speak English. In fact, it is English which has it all wrong, much more so than pinyin.
The Latin or Roman alphabet was originally used by the Romans to write their language. It was later used by other cultures in the best way they could to approximate their own sounds. English was one of them. Then English pronunciation changed so much that in English the sounds totally drifted away from what they originally represented. It is English who is pronouncing the vowels all wrong. It is Spanish or Italian or Romanian who have the closest vowel pronunciation to the original.
When Pinyin was developed they took the obvious Latin letters that best approximated their sounds according to the “original” value of each letter, not of what it is in English which is very removed from the original, and then they used little used letters, like Q, for sounds which had no direct equivalent in the Latin alphabet.
That’s easy. The ‘gh’ used to be pronounced as a sort of choked ‘g’. So “knight” really used to be pronounced kind of like ‘kuh-nicht’. Draught used to be pronounced “draucht”. We gradually got rid of the pronounced “gh”, but kept the old spelling.
And that’s usually the reason that an English word has a weird spelling. It used to be pronounced more like the way it was spelled, that’s why people decided to spell it that way.
Pinyin does not map directly onto English pronunciation (and why should it?), but it’s fairly easy to learn what sounds the letters represent. A few of the sounds are typically difficult for native English speakers, and there are a few sounds that most English speakers do “good enough” to understand but don’t get exactly right.
It takes about two hours with a teacher to learn to read Pinyin adequately. Without that effort, you probably won’t get Pinyin pronunciations right, but once you learn it, you’ll be able to read anything in Pinyin fairly well-- the system is quite consistent for Mandarin (YMMV for regional accents and dialects). I am sure there are online resources and videos out there that can each you enough to get by.
Anyway, Wade-Giles may be also be fairly useable, but it has the disadvantage of leading tourists to wander around looking in vain for the train to Chungking.
Here in Shanghai at least that city is pronounced “ching-dow”, and is consistent with the rules for reading the pinyin [Qingdao].
Qingdao beer still has the label “Tsingtao”, but if you actually pronounce it that way, you will not be understood.
Of course there are things I would gripe about with Pinyin: several of the vowels are different when followed by n (though few study materials seem to make this distinction clear). And the various rules for “i” are a PITA.
But in general it’s pretty logical and I can read Pinyin pretty fast now. And I’m still a relative beginner.
But that’s not any stranger than the inventor of pinyin deciding that “q” should represent a sound somewhere between “ch” and “sh”. In fact, I think the arbitrary-ness of that decision is more logical than an explanation that “gh” used to be pronounced as spelled, but then it wasn’t, but we keep spelling it that way anyway; while in American English we removed the “u” from colour because it wasn’t pronounced, so we stopped spelling it that way.
So you are inventing pinyin and you have already done all the easy letters and now you have in one hand a sound which has no letter to represent it and on the other hand a letter which is pretty much superfluous because other letters have the same sound. What would you do?
I use a q, z, x, or other arbitrary letter to represent the sound that isn’t comparable to an English sound. I think it’s a fine idea. That’s what I’ve been saying.
ETA: Or I just start throwing in other symbols on the keyboard: like @in Sh&h*ngdi, the first Emperor of China.