Is there an explanation why the Wade-Giles system of romanization of Mandarin makes the standard letter sounds need apostrophes?
To be clear, the ‘t’ sound is t’ but an unadorned t is a ‘d’ sound.
Why add that extra complication? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to make the t sound a t and the d sound a t’?
Likewise, ch’ for ch but ch is zh
What am I missing here?
The wikipedia article lists a few reasons, such as “The convention of an apostrophe or ⟨h⟩ to denote aspiration is also found in romanizations of other Asian languages” and the “symmetry” argument later in that paragraph. But basically it was just a bad idea, and one of the reasons that pinyin has replaced Wade-Giles.
Where there is a close correspondence in English to both the aspirated and unaspirated sounds, it looks like a dumb idea, as in t’=t and t=d (WG vs pinyin). It seems much more sensible to use the natural letters that correspond to pronunciation in English.
But how about ts’=c and ts=z; or the example you mention ch’=ch and ch=zh?
Arguably, if you understand the WG aspirated/unaspirated approach for t’ and t, it leads you to a closer approximation to these unaspirated sounds that we don’t use in English, by inference from the corresponding aspirated sound that’s fairly similar to English. Whereas pinyin c, z & zh you just have to learn - they are not close to their use in English (or any other common language that uses the Roman alphabet, so far as I know).
Using “English” letters to learn Mandarin is IMHO a mistake. No English letter sounds exist in Mandarin and vice versa. It just causes confusion.
I learned Mandarin using Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ). These symbols represent Mandarin sounds without the confusion that English letters cause. Clear your mind of all English sounds and focus on learning the brand new sounds of Mandarin.
Wade-Giles were linguists. It’s the aspiration thing. Non-linguists, or those specifically studying how to use the system, have a very rough time.
I beg to differ. Not using Romanized alphabet is IMHO a serious mistake for anyone that uses an alphabet. We are in the computer age, and typing Romanized pinyin works on any keyboard, requires no specialized knowledge, easier to use a Chinese dictionary, is faster and so much easier.
It would be one thing if Zhuyinfuhao (Bopomofo) was used like the Japanese katakana for foreign words, but it’s a symbol system for learning characters. Those using a Romanized language like English who actually make an effort to study Chinese can adapt to the concept that Chinese pinyin is not pronounced like English. Those that don’t make an effort to learn romanization, can still make a stab at it if there is pinyin. Someone who has not studied the zhuyifuhao system, has no idea how to pronounce something like ㄅ or Ƭ̵̬̊
BTW, I learned pinyin and then 2 years later in Taiwan learned zhuyinfuhao. Maybe you learn one first and the other seems awkward…YMMV
It is what happens when the pedantic get hold of pedestrian things.
I’ve seen it happen with birdwatching sites on the net. Tons of google hits for degree ornithologists, and trip accounts from rich birders who have hired expensive guides, but nearly impossible to find useful information to a birder who sees an unfamiliar bird in the field. The pedants have taken over what used to be fun
You can’t watch a baseball game any more without commentators blabbing on and on about exit velocities and launch angles and spin rates… BTW theres a Korean player named Kang, pronounced Gung. How come it can’t be spelled Gung?
Sorry, I digressed. But its an inescapable phenomenon.
Yes, it certainly is terrible to watch a baseball game where the announcers offer information on how to understand what’s happening.
Bearing in mind your point and China Guy’s refutation (which I agree with), this makes pinyin’s sometimes odd choice of letters a virtue. Where the sound doesn’t exist in English, pinyin does not try to approximate. Notably:
c-, zh-, q-, x-
The fact that there’s no attempt to approximate means that you aren’t tempted to mangle the Chinese pronunciation by using some vaguely similar sound in English. You are forced to listen to the novel sounds and map them to these letters as though they were new abstract symbols.
I think one thing you may be missing is that English ‘d’ is a voiced phoneme, but Chinese ‘t’ is unvoiced.
(Thai has three non-nasal dental consonants, normally transcribed /th/, /t/, /d/ though one textbook uses /t/, /dt/, /d/).
Since different languages have different inventories of phonemes, compromises are needed in transcription. A transcription that seems simplest for beginners may cause confusion later.
(I’ve previously mentioned my friend who always mispronounced the name of his lovely friend. Her name was easy for an American to pronounce, but he had tried to render it phonetically, memorized that (ambiguous) written form … and always mispronounced it. :smack: )
Because it’s not pronounced ‘gung’; it’s (probably) /kaŋ/. Aspiration isn’t phonemic in English. In short, unaspirated and aspirated voiceless stops are in complementary distributions in English, but the distinction is phonemic in other languages. In fact, Korean does the opposite: voiced and unvoiced stops are in complementary distribution, but aspirated and unaspirated stops are phonemically distinct. (Korean also has a third series of stops, but that’s irrelevant here.) English doesn’t allow initial unvoiced, unaspirated velar stops, and Korean /k/ in that position is usually interpreted by native English speakers as /g/ rather than /k[SUP]h[/SUP]/.
The situation in Mandarin is worse for English speakers: not only are stops distinguished by aspiration rather than voicing (although the case could be made that English actually does the former as well), but the language marks affricates in the same way, which we don’t have at all in English. You can’t ignore the difference in any useful orthography; they are as different as k vs. g, t vs. d, etc. in English.
I understand that, which is why I made the comment about pedantry trumping practical usefulness. It’s carrying a name to a new culture and then refusing to use
alphbetic symbols that are useful to the new culture. It is the equivalent of a family naming their child Ghoti, and insisting that is pronounced Fish.
There is even a multiplier effect of adding confusion to confusion. NBA player Antetokounmpo is an example. His African name, using Roman alphabet, was Adetokoubo. But in modern Greek phonetics, D and B are pronounced as English TH and V, so his legal name in Greece respelled them as NT and MP, standard Greek form for borrowed words. When his nationality changed back to one of Romanization, the Greek equivalents remained intact, and English speakers pronounce them as NT and MP.