For example, what is typically (but not always) spelled as “Tao Te Ching” is pronounced “Dow duh Jing.” Since English translations of Chinese must be phonetic, why are they spelled so fricking unphonetically?
Because they’re not phonetic – they’re Romanizations, i.e. self-consistent ways to write Chinese syllables in the Roman alphabet. In other words, if I was writing in French or German or Italian I’d still use the same spellings. (I think. Perhaps someone who speaks French & Chinese would care to weigh in?)
The Romanization scheme that produces “Tao Te Ching” is the Wade-Giles scheme, which was not developed with ease of pronunciaton in mind. The now-preferred [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin]Pinyin
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scheme is somewhat more intuitive if you’re trying to pronounce stuff phonetically, but it’s still not perfect for English speakers.
There are a klot of transliterations that were done by linguists who had perfectly good rules that they knew, but which nobody passed on to the general populace. This results in spelling greatly at odds with pronunciations in many cases. The method used for Chinese used “T” for something very much like “D”, and T’ for T. So you get wonton for what’s pronounced “wundun”. “T’ang” is pronounced “Tang” because of that extra apostrophe.
This has, as I note, happened elsewhere, so Pago-Pago is really pronounced "Pango-Pango** because the “n” is assumed. (Similarly, in transliterating Japanese one system “assumes” the “s” in “-tsu”, and simply writes "-tu- ". English words like “tsunami” have the “s”, but company names like “Mitutoyo” keep it as “understood”) The same thing happened with Indian names in upstate New York, so “Nunda” is properly pronounced “Nunn-Day”.
The Pinyin system for writing Chinese was supposed to get around this, but it has its own set of assumptions. So “Tens- Shao-Ping” in the old system became “Deng Xiao Ping” in the Pinyin. and if you don’t know that the “X” is supposed to be kinda like “sh”, you’re still lost.
Crap. Fixed link to the Pinyin scheme.
The romanization problem is made worse by the fact that there’s not just one “Chinese”. Many of the terms used in the West come not from Mandarin (which is now the official dialect) - but from Cantonese, which was encountered more often by Westerners at many points of history.
Kung Fu is actually pronounced Gong Fu
Even after reading the Wiki article on Wade-Giles, I don’t quite see how they came up with T representing a D sound. I understand (now) that it wasn’t phonetic, so what was it?
It is phonetic, in a way. The difference between t and t’ in Wade-Giles is spelled d and t in Pinyin – the two sounds in question are (in linguistic terms) unaspirated and aspirated stops, respectively.
Whisper “ta” and “da” to yourself. Feel how the t and the d are pronounced with the tongue in the same spot, vaguely behind your teeth? They’re basically the same sound, except that the d in “da” is voiced – meaning, your vocal cords are moving when you say it. Well, when you’re not whispering.
The thing is, most English speakers don’t realize it but we’ve actually got three kinds of t/d-like sounds there. Voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated. Say “pat” and “spat” to yourself. There’s a subtle difference between the two p’s – the p in “pat” is aspirated, meaning there’s a little puff of air when you say it. English speakers are used to hearing that little puff of air on sounds like p when they’re at the beginning of a word, so if you record yourself saying “spat” and then cut the s off and play it back, you’ll hear the resulting word as “bat”. Seriously, it’s weird.
Back to Chinese. The sounds being represented as t and d would both be spelled as t if you’re writing in English, but one of them is the aspirated t at the beginning of “tab” and the other one is the unaspirated t in “stab”. When pronounced at the beginning of a word, the t in “stab” sounds a lot like a d to English speakers and others who don’t generally differentiate between the two different kinds of t.
Hope that helps explain the t/d thing without confusing you further.
– Dragonblink, linguistics student extraordinaire
Actually, in Wade-Giles, that’d be Teng Hsiao-P’ing whereas the pinyin is Deng Xiaoping, at least according to my (limited) knowledge of Wade-Giles and the Wikipedia article about the dude.
Anyhow, you have to understand the purpose of Chinese romanization and some other matters as well. The goal of modern romanization schemes is to unambiguously represent the sounds of whatever language you’re discussing; in this case I’ll limit myself to Mandarin because I don’t speak any other Chinese languages. But there’s other issues as well - the Latin alphabet, with its twenty-six letters, is the most widely-available alphabet in the world. New letters could be made up to represent the sounds of Mandarin, or Greek letters could be added, but that would make it harder to use pinyin in many contexts. So we’re limited to twenty-six characters, and only five vowels, which is hardly enough to represent any language. Therefore, artful use of those letters is necessary.
A bit of history - for a long-ass time, there was no standard way to represent Chinese in Roman characters. So, as trade relationships and so forth developed between China and the West, the names of people and places were simply approximated into Roman characters at the whim of whoever did it. Often with mistakes. Thus, the city of Canton, which was so dubbed by an Irish sea captain, was actually named for its region (Guangdong), rather than the city itself (Guangzhou). I don’t know any Cantonese; it’s possible that the sounds correspond a bit better in Cantonese, but it’s obvious that this is a pretty poor name for the city.
The fact that there are several Chinese languages, all quite different from one another, complicates matters. For instance, under this ad hoc system, which was eventually systematized (in the sense of choosing standard names, not in the sense of establishing an actual transcription scheme) into the Post Office System, Beijing was named “Peking”, which is either the Cantonese or Shanghainese name for the city (I’ve heard both.)
Canton and Shanghai were important ports used for trade with the west, so Cantonese and Shanghainese were the main languages through which words made their way from Chinese into English (and vice versa, which explains some of the correspondingly weird Mandarin names for cities and countries in the West.) Since the language of government was Mandarin, the use of Cantonese and Shanghainese for this purpose was naturally suboptimal.
Sometime around the mid-19th century, I believe, the Wade-Giles transcription scheme was developed. It was specifically designed by Sinologists for academic work; it was acceptable, therefore, for it to be obscure and difficult for non-specialists. Thus the use of apostrophes, which were by themselves probably the biggest problem with transcription into English because very, very frequently they would be omitted, making cataloguing books and stuff quite a bit harder.
The “t-d”/“g-k”/“p-b” issue has been mentioned. To summarize, English has two sets of stop consonants, /ptk/, which are unvoiced but aspirated (spoken with a brief puff of air) at the beginning of syllables, and /bdg/, which are voiced but unaspirated. Modern Mandarin has two series of stops as well (along with corresponding fricatives and affricates), but all initial consonents in Chinese except /mnlr/ are unvoiced - the only difference between the two sets is aspiration. (Note: I’ll mostly be using phonetic transcription, which is in [square brackets], using SAMPA, the system for putting phonetic transcription into ASCII text. I don’t know if SAMPA equivalents exist for some Mandarin sounds - but I doubt they do - so I’ll be simply referring to pinyin and Wade-Giles spellings, enclosing them in <angle brackets>. It shouldn’t pose a problem for comprehension.)
So phonetically, the stop consonants of Mandarin are [p[sup]h[/sup]], [t[sup]h[/sup]], [k[sup]h[/sup]], [p], [t], and [k]. The superscript <h> represents aspiration. The stop consonants of English are [p[sup]h[/sup]], [t[sup]h[/sup]], [k[sup]h[/sup]], [ b], [d], and [g]. (Extra space because it’s the only way that occurs at the moment to stop it from turning that into a bold tag.) As it happens, [p], [t], and [k] sound to English speakers (since those sounds don’t occur on their own in English) like [ b], [d], and [g], so in pinyin, the letters <bdg> are used to represent them. In actuality, the first syllable in “Beijing” would be phonetically written as [pei], but an English speaker would hear a ** and would be perfectly understandable if they used a ** in speaking.
But like I said, the first widely-used phonetic transcription scheme for Mandarin was Wade-Giles, developed for specialists. Not only was precision important to them, but they also used it to represent Middle Chinese. Middle Chinese had all three sets of consonants we’ve been discussing - [p[sup]h[/sup]], [t[sup]h[/sup]], [k[sup]h[/sup]], [p], [t], [k], and [ b], [d], and [g]. So the letters <bdg> were reserved in Wade-Giles for [ b], [d], and [g], and the apostrophe was used to represent aspiration, so [p[sup]h[/sup]] became <p’> - as in the aforementioned Teng Hsiao-p’ing. That’s why you get the seemingly unintuitive spellings of words like “Tao Te Ching” (pinyin: Dao De Jing), “Kung Fu” (pinyin: Gongfu).
Clearly other things changed as well, if you’ve been looking at what I’ve written. Representation of vowels changed, and I’m not the only one out there who thinks the Wade-Giles system was slightly better in that respect. Also, the consonant symbols in Wade-Giles could often represent two different sounds, simply as an economy, which avoided some of the odd letter usages in pinyin. For instance, the sounds that pinyin writes <q> and <ch> are both written <ch’> in Wade-Giles. This avoids the counterintuitive use of <q> for something that (to an English speaker) sounds mostly like a “ch”, and it’s acceptable for these purposes because those two sounds are in complementary distribution, that is, the rest of the word determines which one will be used in a given circumstance. Just like you know “rgick” couldn’t be an English word, the Wade-Giles <ch’ang> has to represent pinyin <chang>, because the combination of sounds that would be represented by pinyin *<qang> is impossible in Mandarin.
So in summation, by the time pinyin was introduced as a standard, there were two romanization systems in common use. Both of them are quite unintuitive in some situations, but that happens because there is simply no easy way to represent these sounds in English, especially the ones that don’t exist in English. Pinyin does a good job unambiguously representing consonants, but knowledge of Mandarin phonology is required to recognize that the <u> in pinyin <qun> and <chun> represent entirely different sounds - again, because only one is possible after each consonant (whereas in Wade-Giles, the disambiguation is dumped onto the consonants: thus Wade-Giles <ch’ün> and <ch’un>). Since Mandarin has six basic vowels, and the Roman alphabet only has five, the umlaut is used always in Wade-Giles to represent the sound [y], which is like the “u” in French “tu”. In pinyin, in contrast, the umlaut is only used rarely, when it can’t be determined from the preceding consonant. Another choice would have been to declare that the letter <y> represented that vowel (for reasons I’m not going to get into, the use of it for consonants is not strictly necessary), but that would make pinyin spellings even weirder-looking.
There’s of course other changes besides the ones I’ve described. Multi-syllable words and names are usually (always?) hyphenated in Wade-Giles, whereas they’re crammed together in pinyin. Wade-Giles uses numbers after words to represent tone (the characteristic pitch pattern with which Chinese words are pronounced; it’s as much a part of a word’s pronunciation as the vowel.) So in Wade-Giles, you get <ch’u4> whereas in pinyin that would be <qù>. Of course, both are frequently left off, and pinyin requires ones that are impossible in many environments (such as here on the SDMB) - the macron, a horizontal line over the vowel, and the hacek (I think that’s what it’s called!) used in some weird-ass eastern European languages, looking like a little “v” above the vowel. Plus, you occasionally need a <ü> with a tone mark on top of that!
Now, the situation gets worse. See, pinyin was set as the standard by the Beijing government, the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Whereas the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan (Wade-Giles: <T’ai-wan>, or something like that). Because, you see, it would be some sort of capitulation to the PRC if the ROC used pinyin. So they use Wade-Giles, which means that much of the time, when I meet a Chinese person, the pronunciation of their name is completely unclear from the spelling. Many older folks who immigrated from mainland China did so before pinyin was well-established, so they’ll also spell their names in Wade-Giles.
The switch from Wade-Giles to pinyin explains why we have both <Mao Tse-Tung> and <Mao Zedong> in English, or <Chou En-Lai> and <Zhou Enlai>. However, recall that old-fashioned city name spellings like “Peking” and “Canton” predate even Wade-Giles.
So, in summary, English spellings of Chinese words are confusing because (1) there are multiple systems to do it, and most people don’t realize when they’re using one or the other; words that entered during different historical epochs used different spellings; (2) English and Chinese have different sounds, and the phonetic distinctions between some Chinese consonants seem terribly subtle to English speakers (so, for instance, the <d> in <Dao De Jing> (remember? Wade-Giles <Tao Te Ching>) doesn’t sound exactly like a “t” or “d” in English; (3) under both systems, parts tend to be left out in English: apostrophes (extensively-used in Wade-Giles; used rarely and for an entirely different purpose in pinyin), umlauts, and tone numbers or marks, which means that the spellings used in non-scholarly publications tend to be ambiguous; (4) pinyin and Wade-Giles exist for different purposes, and meet different needs; pinyin is only for modern, standardized Mandarin and tends to be more intuitive to English speakers, while Wade-Giles works for older forms of the language and (IIRC) for other dialects; (5) you ain’t gonna pronounce the <j> in “Beijing” right anyhow, but an English “j” is as close as you’re gonna get. So naturally, American English speakers pronounce it with a French “j”, which is so wrong it’s not even funny.
Sorry for my rambliness and length. If I’ve fucked up noticeably, or left shit out, or you’re still confused, or you have more questions, feel free to ask. If you’d like, I’ll also talk about the many other romanization systems in use: Taiwan’s new one, which is a lot like pinyin; Yale romanization, which is designed to be more-or-less readable to native English speakers; and Gwoyeu Romatzyh (I’ve probably misspelled that), which was designed apparently by a committee headed by Cruella DeVil and the Marquis de Sade as the most impossible-to-use romanization system possible. Apologies if any parts of this seemed overly technical - I’ve tried to explain every phonetic term I used, but it would have been even longer had I decided to use less technical language.
Dumped onto the vowels, I mean.
What I’m getting at here, if it’s not clear, is that there’s simply not enough letters in English to elegantly represent all the consonants and vowels of Chinese. But many consonants in Mandarin can only precede certain vowels - or, to look at it from the other perspective, many vowels can only follow certain consonents. Imagine a language with only four sounds, /pbiu/. And /b/ could only precede /i/, and /p/ could only precede /u/. Now, it would still be clearest to write it them <bi> and <pu>, but you could also, say, write them <pi> and <pu>, and count on the reader to know that that’s actually /bi/. Or you could write them <bi> and <pi> and count on the reader to figure out that it’s really /pu/. Either way, it’s unambiguous. Wade-Giles generally uses different vowel letters to distinguish otherwise ambiguous consonants; pinyin uses different consonants to distinguish ambiguous vowels (specifically, to distinguish <u> from <ü>.)
There’s several sounds in Mandarin whose closest approximation in English would be “sh” and “ch”. Since that would leave the words ambiguous to folks with some knowledge of Mandarin, and result in a lot of words being spelled the same, pinyin uses weird-ass spellings like <xu>, <qu>, <ju>, <chu>, <shu>, and <zhu> to distinguish what are, in fact, six very similar consonants.
Well, this is a whole set of letters to represent Mandarin. And [url=http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chinese.htm]here’s the main page for Chinese writing on the Omniglot.
And I really wish I had posted the bit about the voiced vs voiceless stops when I read this thread before you posted your excellent description!
Correction: here’s the main page for Chinese writing on the Omniglot.
Bravo Excalibre!!
That was a thoroughly readable and very clear explanation for the non-specialist, and answered many questions I had and the second-order questions the first set of answers would have prompted. Would that I could write as well on my field.
Thank you.
Aww, I’m blushing - I figured I was being way too dense and putting in irrelevant information. Monty’s linked to a page on zhuyin fuhao, casually known as bopomofo (after the first four symbols in the set), and I forgot to mention that. It’s a mechanism for phonetic recording of Chinese sounds using symbols that are derived from existing Chinese characters, simplifying them to a couple strokes. My understanding it’s that it’s not used much at all in mainland China, but is still used to some extent in Taiwan - for example, to teach new characters to schoolchildren.
Wow, great posts. On a semi related subject, I am thinking of having my kids take Mandarin lessons, any advice/book recs/ helpful hints?
I think a lot of areas have classes set up specifically for “heritage learners”, kids of Chinese descent who don’t speak it much in the home or children adopted from China; if you live in an area with a Chinese community, that’s probably the best way to find classes for your kids. I don’t know of any particular books or recordings designed with children in mind but I would recommend that they learn under the tutelage of a native speaker rather than only through books or recordings, mostly because Mandarin phonology is so different from English that I have a hard time imagining how a student would learn to make the right sounds without having that feedback.
Aside from that, don’t neglect to have them learn the characters, and learn them properly - it’s possibly the hardest part of learning Mandarin but there’s little point in learning it without learning to read and write, and it’s easiest to integrate them into a single step rather than learning to speak and later learning literacy. Plus, with the internet, there’s a wealth of reading material available in most any major language, which makes it easier to find real-world practice material (though it’ll be a long time before they’re much beyond laboriously decoding the headlines of a newspaper.)
Do your kids want to do this? Learning another language is a big commitment, and my own experience studying several foreign languages is that it takes a good deal longer to develop basic “survival-level” skills in a language as different from English as Mandarin is. That means it’s a bigger commitment than, say, Spanish lessons - Spanish and Mandarin being, in my humble estimation, probably the most useful foreign languages for an American kid to learn nowadays. I’d also imagine that it’d be easiest if you studied with them, making it more of a family activity and so that you’ll all be able to practice together at home. Granted if they go on to learn the language thoroughly, you’ll probably be left in the dust.
I’m curious about the situation. Are you and your children white? How old are they? Why do you think they should learn Mandarin? If your kids are interested, I think it’d be a really cool thing to do.
Great posts indeed. Thanks for the thorough and, more importantly, clear explanation.
In addition to Excalibre’s great points, it’s best to expose kids to Mandarin as soon as possible, because your brain stops learning new sounds after a certain age, making it difficult to learn a new language. With most languages it means you’ll have a funny accent. With Chinese this will cause bigger problems, what with the tonalities and all. I’m Chinese and I find a lot of my non-Chinese friends can’t seem to hear any difference between certain sounds that are very distinct to me.
I wouldn’t overemphasize this too much. Every aspect of language learning - from phonetics, including tone, to grammar, to sociolinguistic competence (in areas like knowing how to speak politely and what social situations require it) - is easier when you’re younger. But it’s pessimistic to suggest that you can’t learn those things when you’re older. Children, especially at 8 years old or younger, acquire those skills much more easily and perfectly than adults, but adults can and do learn languages fluently with sufficient practice and skill. Tone poses little problem for me in Mandarin, and I started studying it at 19.
Interestingly, though, it’s been shown that perfect pitch is far, far more common among native speakers of tonal languages than those of us who speak non-tonal ones. Perfect pitch is not terribly common even among skilled musicians in the West, and it was always believed that it was essentially an ability that you either have or don’t have, probably a genetic phenomenon (since it appears to run in families.) But it turns out that early practice with attention to pitch seems to train the ears to recognize and reproduce pitches exactly.
hijack
can someone give me the english letter written way to say
“warlocks can not summon food and drink, mages summon food and drink,”
I keep getting chinese farmers in world of warcraft asking my lock to summon them bread and drink…
also if i can get it in korean? I am not entirely certain if they are asking in chinese or korean… but it is 3 words, the last one is ‘bien’ and I do know it isnt german or french=)
/hijack