One issue is the transitory period between the time a word is adopted from another language and the time its pronunciation is generally fixed. The word “Moscow” should actually be written “Moskva” to be phonetically correct. But “Moscow” has become the accepted English pronunciation. I would wager that when people started saying it that way, there were others who told them: “No, that’s pronounced Moskva”. Perhaps in the future the Feng Shui will be pronounced exactly as it is spelled.
Let’s start with this: The Roman alphabet was invented by the Romans (it figures) to write their own sounds. Later it was adopted to write other languages for which it was not quite suited (like German and English). To complicate things further english went through some profound pronunciation changes but kept the spelling the same. So, the closest languages to pronouncing Roman letters “correctly” would be Romance languages: Romanian, Italian, Spanish… English has it all wrong.
PinYin was developed by the Chinese communist government with the help of Russian advisors. I believe they initially intended to use Cyrillic characters but ended up using Roman characters. Still, the influence is there. (I found a good basic explanation about this in the Lonely Planet travel guide to China, but I do not have it at hand now) Needless to say, they were not using English pronunciation of letters as a guideline. It would have been crazy taking into account the English pronunciation is an isolated case and the Romance values are much more widespread in other languages.
Like any language, pronunciation of words has a certain range. Any American word you can think of has enough pronunciation range that it could be spelled different ways. Not to mention words which are routinely mispronounced, even by people reading the news. “Facts” has a T and yet everybody pronounces it fax. “Dentist” is mostly pronounced “Denist”. Etc.
Dao and Tao are only distinguishable if you pronounce very carefully. In common speech you would not be able to tell the difference.
So before we worry too much about spelling Chinese words, I propose a deep reform of English spelling which is quite nonsensical.
WTF??? Dao and Tao are completely different words. Maybe you can’t tell 'em apart, but Chinese speakers sure can. That is ignoring different tones. You’re saying the equivalent of “run” and “fun” are indistinguishable in common American or English speech. You shouldn’t spread false information about a foreign language you don’t speak.
Lonely Planet’s guide to China is another wealth of misinformation. some of their “facts” are correct, but a lot of it is pure crapola they either made up themselves or got from drunken bar flies. Some of the Lonely Planet guides are great, but the China one is very hit-and-miss.
A postscript is that the Chinese use characters and not romanization. The pinyin is primarily for foreigners learning Chinese or as a learning tool for young kids. The young kids learn characters as early as possible and do not rely on pinyin. Any foreigner who has studied Chinese for a few years is much faster and more accurate at pinyin than the average Chinese.
In Daniel’s and Bright’s “The World’s Writing Systems”, they list the Pinyin and the Wade-Giles systems, plus the actual phonemes the letters in either system represents. I’ll attempt to show them here: P - Pinyin, W - Wade Giles. The IPA is inbetween //'s, with the ASCII. NOTE: THis is very long and complicated. The vowels especially so in Wade- Giles system. Go here to see what the ASCII SAMPA is all about: http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/ascii-ipa.html.
P: a - /E/, /A/, /a/ in ian = ien = /i_^En/
W: e /E/ in ian = ien = /i_^En/
a - /A/ before ng
u; lao = lao = /lau_^/
a - /a/ elsewhere
P: b - /b0/
W: p - /b0/
P: c - /ts_h/ before i: ci = ts’u^ = /ts_hi1/, ts’ elsewhere
W: tz’ - /ts_h/ before i: ci = ts’u^ = /ts_hi1/, ts’ elsewhere
P: ch - /ts’_h/ note chi = ch’ih = /ts’hr=,=/
W: ch’ - /ts’_h/ note chi = ch’ih = /ts’hr=,=/
P: d - /d_0/
W: t - /d_0/
P: e - /@/ before nasals: ben = pe^n = /b_0@n/
W: e^ - /@/ before nasals: ben = pe^n = /b_0@n/
eh - /E/ after i, ü, y: tie = t’ieh = /t_hi_^E/
e - /e/ before i: wei = wei = /wei_^/
e^/o - /7/ elsewhere: he = he^/ho = /X7/
P: f - /f/
W: f - /f/
P: g - /g_0/
W: k - /g_0/
P: h - /X/
W: h - /X/
P: i - /r=,=/ After ch, r, sh, zh: chi = ch’i = /ts’hr=,=/
W: ih - /r=,=/ After ch, r, sh, zh: chi = ch’i = /ts’hr=,=/
uv (v = goes over u) - /1/ after c, s, z: ci = ts’uv - /ts_h1/
i - /Ii_^/ after gu, ku: kui = k’uei = /k_hu_^Ii_^/
i - /i_^/ before/after vowels: lai = lai = /lai_^/
i - /I/ before ng, ng: bin = pin = /b_0In/
i - /i/ elswhere: li = li = /li/
P: j - /d_0z/ Before i, u: ju = chü = /d_0z\y/
W: ch - /d_0z/ Before i, u: ju = chü = /d_0z\y/
P: k - /k_h/
W: k’ - /k_h/
P: l - /l/
W: l - /l/
P: m - /m/
W: m - /m/
P: n - /n/
W: n - /n/
P: ng - /N/
W: ng - /N/
P: o - /u_^/ after a: lao = lao = /lAu_^/
W: o - /u_^/ after a: lao = lao = /lAu_^/
o - /o/ before u: tou = t’ou = /t_Hou_^/
u - /U/ before ng: zhong = chung = /d_0z’UN/
o - /7/ elsewhere: po = po = /p_h7/
P: p - /p_h/
W: p’ - /p_h/
P: q - /ts_h/ before i, u: qu = ch’ü = /ts_hy/
W: ch’ - /ts_h/ before i, u: qu = ch’ü = /ts_hy/
P: r - /r/ final: er = erh = /7r/
W: rh - /r/ final: er = erh = /7r/
j - /r/ elsewhere; note ri = jih = /r=,_=/
P: s - /s/ before i: si = ssuv = /s1/
W: ss/sz - /s/ before i: si = ssuv = /s1/
s - /s/ elswhere: su = su = /su/
P: sh - /s’/
W: sh - /s’/
P: t - /t_h/
W: t’ - /t_h/
P: u - /y/ after q, j, x, y: qu = ch’ü = /ts_hy/
W: ü - /y/ after q, j, x, y: qu = ch’ü = /ts_hy/
u - /Uu_^/ after i: diu = tiu = /d_0i_^Uu_^/
u - /u_^/ before a vowel: kua = k’ua = /k_hu_^a/
u - /U/ before n: sun = sun = /sUn/
u - /u/ elsewhere: mu = mu = /mu/
P: ü - /y/ after l, n: nü = nü = /ny/
W: ü - /y/ after l, n: nü = nü = /ny/
P: w - /w/
W: w - /w/
P: x - /s/ before i, u: xu = hsü = /s\y/
W: hs - /s/ before i, u: xu = hsü = /s\y/
P: y - /y/
W: y - /y/
P: z - /d_0z/
W: tz - /d_0z/ before i: si = tzuv = /d_0z1/
ts - /d_0z/ before u: zu = tsu = /d_0zu/
P: zh - /d_0Z/ Note zhi = chih = /d_0z’r=,=/
W: ch - /d_0Z/ Note zhi = chih = /d_0z’r=,=/
It WILL be difficult to understand the IPA but, i’m sure you all being dopers can figure it out ;). This is more or less to show how Pinyin and the Wade - Giles system represents the various sounds (and just how many different sounds there really are). I didnt even try to tackle the tones (which in Pinyin require some special characters not available in your standard ASCII set (I think). Wade- Giles uses numbers 1-4 for the Mandarin tones.
I think you’re talking about BoPoMoFo, right?
ChinaGuy, I find your tone needlessly offensive. You are not the Pope and you are not the ultimate authority on anything. So you can go WTF yourself.
Lonely Planet may well have mistakes and inacuracies but that does not discredit everything they say. If you want to prove a mistake you’ll have to present some evidence as I am not about to take your word over theirs. In fact, I found a page that supports what they say.
Would you care to present some evidence that proves this is false? Mind you, I am not saying it has to be true, only that the evidence I have so far shows it is true in all probability.
>> Dao and Tao are completely different words
I didn’t say they weren’t. So are “fax” and “facts” in English but people do not speak classroom language. In any language, including Chinese, there are wide variations on how it is spoken and when people speak fast they do not pronounce carefully like you would in a classroom setting. In this board we have frequent examples of misspelling of English words. If you are well educated the error is obvious but obviously it is not obvious to the person who makes the mistake. “Affect” and “effect” are, to me, two very different words, with different pronunciations and different spelling. Yet, many Americans have trouble with them. The list of such words is endless and we have had many threads dedicated to poor spelling. Chinese is no different from any other language in that all sounds are not so distinct that they would never be mistaken in the absence of context.
The Chinese themselves and many foreigners have written “Dao” and “Tao” for the same word which goes to show you it is not so clear cut. In any language D and T are very similar sounds. The same thing happens with other sounds: Bei, Pei, Gong, Kong. You could conceivably go either way in writing and only the establishment of a set of rules tells you what you should use. In the past both alternatives were used extensively.
In normal speech, context provides a lot of meaning. You can listen to someone speaking english with a strong regional accent and know if the meant to say “her” or “hair” or “here” or “hare” or “har” by the context. Take away the context and you have no idea what the word may be. You can call someone on the phone and recite them a long list of unrelated words and ask them to write down what they hear. Try sprinkling a lot of similars like Bei, Pei, Tao, Dao, Kong, Gong etc. Without any context see how many the other person gets right. I bet it’s less than 100%.
All the letters of the English alphabet have names which are pronounced distinctly differently. Why do people need to say “T as in tango, N as in Nancy, etc”? Because the rest of the word provides context. Try using Tang and Dang instead. It does not help. Try using Tao and Dao. Any better?
Besides, as the OP notes, the same word is and has often been spelled with D or T by scholars and Chinese native speakers alike. Are you saying they are all ignorant idiots to not be able to tell the difference? I often travel to Canton. My friend in Pekin writes it Guang Zhou (pinyin) while my friend in Hong Kong writes it Kwan Chow. Which one is an imposter? I remember spending quite a while one day discussing the different ranges of pronunciation for “Zhou”. As is normal in any language, different people pronounce it differently.
>> You’re saying the equivalent of “run” and “fun” are indistinguishable in common American or English speech.
Now I have to say WTF? What have you been smoking? Where did I say that? R and F are nowhere similar as D and T. Don’t put words in my mouth. You stick to saying your own stupidities and I’ll do mine, thank you very much.
>> You shouldn’t spread false information about a foreign language you don’t speak.
And you should learn some manners. And who told you I don’t speak Chinese? You can disagree with me all you want but you are not the ultimate authority here about this or anything else. If you have read previous posts of mine, you would know I have been to China quite a few times for quite some time each. I am not fluent in Chinese but I know enough to know what I am talking about. And I got most of my information from my girlfriend who is Chinese. Somehow I trust her more than I trust you. Not to mention she’s got some manners unlike some people around here.
Um, I’ll be looking for the tone in this thread to come down.
A lot.
A big DUI BU QI to Manhattan and Sailor. I threw in a gratuitious line that was personal rather than factual. Just to show I have some basis for my opinions, I do in fact have a degree in Mandarin, lived in Taiwan (first in 1982, were you there Manhattan?), HK and China for over 15 years, wife is a native Shanghaiese, Mandarin is the primary language used in both my home and business, and among other things spent several years during the 1980’s in the China guidebook publishing business.
A better example for the equivalent of “tao” and “dao” in American English would be “talk” and “dock”. Both “t” sounds are aspirated, while the “d” sounds are not. As near as I can tell, the mouth shape and tongue position are the same in both English and Mandarin. Let the reader judge if they think “talk” and “dock” are easily mistaken words.
When starting Mandarin, I started out listening to godawful language tapes for hours a day the first few weeks. After enough pronunciation drill repetition, the “t” and “d” sounds were distinguishable. More difficult in my opinion but still master able is the difference between “x” and “sh” such as “xia” (down) and “sha” (tall building/mansion), or between “qu” and “chu” as is “chuqu” (to go out). After the first few weeks, everyone who hadn’t dropped the class had mastered pinyin.
As for Lonely Planet, we will just have to agree to disagree since I don’t want to deconstruct it. I personally spent several years in the China guidebook publishing business and met Michael Buckley, one of the original LP China guidebook writers.
IIRC, the HK Cantonese romanization for “Guangzhou” is “kwangchow” (missing a “g”). Again, cantonese romanization is not related to the pinyin system. I personally would take anything the HK Chinese teach about China with a big grain of salt. They are famous throughout China for having the worst accented Mandarin, that is if they actually speak Mandarin. I forget, but something like half of all HK citizens have never been across the border into China.
Just to confuse readers further, Yale also have/had their own romanization system. I haven’t heard anything from Yale in ages, and perhaps even they have adopted pinyin.
fandango, YEAH, that’s it, BoPoMoFo! I had utterly forgotten that series! (Being the first four sounds in the set.) DeTeNeLe, JrChrShr(‘j/r’), DzTzCz, GeeCheeShee, that’s all I can remember (there has to be something else?). Nice to have the sounds clustered so you can learn how to distinguish among them.
I also have to admit that my teacher gave me high marks for being able to distinguish (easily) the closest phonemes. So I might not be the best person to be discussing how these things sound to other people. They are fairly easily distinguishable to me, and most Chinese people I know are a bit less lazy in the mouth than most Americans I know, so there’s a ‘louder’ difference between the sounds, IMHO. (not so much crossover between ‘d’ and ‘t’ in my ear.) But that could just be because they also were talking to a furriner, and were trying a bit harder to be clear. I think that many Westerners seem to both say and hear less difference between the sounds than I do (hence the ‘dock’ vs, ‘talk’ sound issue).
And the j/r issue is neither, for me. That is a sound that there is no equivalent for, so I can’t put it closer to either ‘j’ or ‘r’ - it is actually closer to a blocked-while-aspirated ‘e’, in my opinion! And the mouth position is different from any English-pronounced roman letter, from what I can tell. Major hard to reproduce if you didn’t grow up with it, but I can certainly recognize it with no problem! And it ain’t no J or R. (Though thinking back, most of the people in my class tended to mispronounce it into ‘r’, so I guess that is how THEY heard it!)
Funny, until this thread, I never thought I had much ‘gift’ for language! But maybe my gift is just the hearing part (hey, I’ll take it - otherwise, my foreign language skills are pretty sucky, French and Chinese notwithstanding.)
(and China Guy, I hadn’t heard anyone mention the Yale system since … uh, like, almost 20 years ago! I think it must be dead.)
IMHO, the best response to the OP was the statement about it being a system developed BY the Chinese, for themselves, not to make anyone else’s lives easier. And I do recall that it was developed (or at least ‘sold’ to the nation) as a method to increase literacy among schoolchildren - but I also recall that we discussed the failure of that approach when I was taking a few short courses at Beijing Shifan Daxue (Beijing Normal/Teaching School). It ended up being a useful tool for international business, government, media, etc., but is fairly useless as a shortcut to literacy. There was a great deal of wailing and knashing of teeth about the loss of character recognition (inability to recognize uncommon but useful words) amongst the young as it was (back in about 1985), and a re-emphasis on learning more characters lest people be unable to read their own language.
Heres an almost completely unrelated question. I will return later with the answer (which will astound you with the inefficiency of Chinese and Japanese) if nobody else comes up with it first (which seems doubtful considering the sharpness of this board’s patrons):
Considering Chinese and its related Japanese counterpart Kanji are not phonetic, how does a Chinese person look up a name in the phone book, a word in the dictionary, a topic in an index, etc etc?
Many Chinese characters are phonetic to a degree. Part of many characters is phoentic and part ideographical. As an example, the word for “horse” (“ma”) is made up of the radicals for (you guessed it) horse, which is the meaning, and female, which by itself is also pronounced “ma” but with a slightly different intonation. Two female radicals together is “mama” which means (you guessed it 
) “mother.”
But I have no clue how you would look something up in a phone book or dictionary.
Help! Won’t someone close this thread? All I know is I figured out or read someplace years ago that if there is an apostrophe, you pronounce the letter like it is, and if there is no apostrophe, you pronounce it like some other letter. Example for T: Tao. No apostrophe, so pronounce the T as something else, in this case D. At least I learned from this thread that that apostrophe is actually a matter of aspiration.
I always wondered why J was sometimes pronounced R as in the word jen, meaning generous or magnanimous. How could anybody ever think that J and R had anything in common?
How do you pronounce Lao tzu or Lao tse? LOWTzuh with the OW as in when you are hurt? Also, Peking was once pronounced PAYPING as well as BAYJING.
Getting to Latin, you can easily spell in English if you know a little Latin. For instance whether to add ance or ence, able or ible: here is the rule: if the word comes from the first conjugation in Latin (infinitive ending in are), you add able and ance, but if it comes from the second or other conjugation (infinitive ere et alia) yhou simply add ible and ence. Thus the word is portable instead of portible because portable comes from the Latin porto, portare, portavi, portatus, meaning I carry, to carry, I carried (or something like that in the past, I never could understand the difference between perfect and imperfect, but portavi is perfect), and the participle. Portatus -a -um it goes.
The scholars figured out English spelling on the basis of Latin conjugations and other Latin details. I suppose we should now all complain about it. In French you round your mouth as if to say O, but then you say OUGH and it comes out EU and then you narrow the air passage and you get the sound in French U, as in TU, which sounds like TYO in English. Oh and I heard that Swedish has 5 vowels that we don’t have in English at all, and when they mean O they put an O over an A instead of just writing A. I wonder how that ceremony that Warp was always undergoing, the Zhow zhUK! is really pronounced in his native tongue. And Balana isn’t really spelled Balana, but I forget how it is spelled, so we should thank our lucky stars that we haven’t found any space aliens yet to contend with. As Phyllis Neal once said to Gort, " Something, something Nicto," and saved the earth, so these things are important!
Friedo, I don’t know about phone books, but Chinese dictionaries are “alphabetized” by the complexity of a characters’ strokes.
There are 214 (?) fundamental characters called radicals which more or less dictate “alphabetical” order in Chinese. In a word comprising 2 or more characters, the radical is usually – but not always – the first character (or the leftmost portion of a single compound character).
(China Guy, feel free to jump in if I am not explaining this correctly. I am only self-taught on a very few basic characters.)
Anyway, the beginning entries in a Chinese dictionary would contain words with one-stroke radicals. The word “yi”, meaning “one”, consists of a single horizontal stroke, so it would be either the first or a very early radical. Later, 2-stroke radicals come into play, then 3-strokes, and so on.
What if several charcaters are 3 strokes? How are they distinguished “alphabetically”? I think that they are distinguished by HOW they are written – what order the strokes are written, how the strokes are or are not joined, or something like that. I do know that stroke order is (said to be) absolutely essential to really knowing how to write Chinese, and that some similar characters can be distinguished based on stroke order.
Others certainly can explain this better, but I believe I have the fundamentals correct in thsi explanation.
Lao zi is the pinyin romanization. The zi sound is close to the “ds” in “fads”. Yep, the Lao part rhymes with “ou” sound of “ouch”.
Beijing has been romanized in many forms including Peking, Peiking, Peiping, Beiping. Thecharacters stand for Northern Capital. Please note, when pronounced PEYPING, the second character was changed so that it became Northern Peace. (This came about because the KMT or Nationalists capital was IIRC in Nanjing (literally southern capital), then moved to Chongqing during the war with Japan, and finally moved to Taipei (which is written Taibei in pinyin).
Bordelond is essentially correct on how you look up Chinese characters. It’s based on the radicals (the building blocks for Chinese characters) and stroke order. It’s a slow process. Looking up using pinyin and then selecting the correct character is usually much faster if you know how to pronounce a word. Nowadays, it is computerized so you type in the pinyin on a computer, get a list of character choices with that sound and select the correct one.
Yes, Bordelond got it!
Amazing, no? I was astounded when told this. A Chinese student of mine told me and I was later told by a Japanese that it is the same there.
Japanese and Chinese school children spend countless hours memorizing the number of strokes in countless characters. This is time wasted I feel (although one must admit that the Japanese are the world’s best rote memorizers). I consider our ridiculous spelling system a waste of time as well; almost all Western languages have VERY consistent spelling. My specialty, German, is regularly changed to conform to pronunciation rules (it is now Foto, not Photo, for example).
The Japanese complicate matters by having TWO phonetic alphabets in addition to the character system. The Chinese have NO phonetic alphabet whatsoever (say my Chinese students. I cant confirm this personally).
Some characters (I am told) can have lines that APPEAR to be two strokes or vice versa. You just have to know if the pen was lifted up or not. In addition, many charaters have the same number of strokes, so its determined by WHERE stroke number one is. Center? Upper left? Does it go across or down? Still not good enough? Then look at stroke number two.
I, personally, am flabbergasted at this astoundingly over-complicated system.
As for Ang Lee, note that his name is rendered in pinyin as Li An, not only the traditional Chinese order, but also without the “g”. No telling where he got that. Many southern Chinese can’t here the difference between a final “n” and an “ng”. But he didn’t necessarily have anything to do with the subtitles.
Anyway, as in his name, Taiwanese romanization is pretty cavalier. Last I heard, they were wrangling about whether to adopt the pinyin system to make life easier for foreigners in Taiwan, or one quite similar to pinyin that was also supposedly able to represent not just Mandarin, the majority dialect in China, but also the Minan and Hakka dialects as used in Taiwan.
For those interested in one online analysis of Chinese characters:
And incidentally, Chinese is a tonal language. The tones aren’t reflected in the Chinese characters, but they are in the romanization. Yeah, the characters are tough, which is why the Communists originally hoped to phase them out in favor of romanization, but it doesn’t look like they will now.
I don’t know, it doesn’t seem all that hard to me to look up things by radical. Especially if you have a good dictionary that lists the symbol by more than one of the radicals in it, then its pretty darn easy to find the/a radical, count all the strokes in the character, and then just go to that section of the dictionary and voila, there you are.
I’m not even chinese or japanese.
Is there any other person here who doesn’t think its all that hard? Or am I just bluffing?
-Kris
PS I am learning japanese, not chinese, so there’s not as many symbols to look for. Also, my impression may be skewed because I use the Spahn/Hamidsky radical system - I don’t know how different that system is than the classical chinese system.
Even with the mere 2000 Chinese characters the Japanese language uses, looking up characters via radical is certainly more of a chore than looking up a word alphabetically. As for your not being Chinese or Japanese, my impression of most Chinese is that they use the radical system less than foreign learners of Chinese. (And even less than, say, Americans use dictionaries).
Another question is why Americans have to use Beijing instead of Peking; some people seem to think that the old spelling smacks of “imperialism”. Yet the French still use Pékin (with an accented e). I understand the Chinese government demanded the Beijing spelling of the Americans when Nixon went to China. (The French normalized diplomatic relations earlier, and besides, they weren’t the great satan). As for pinyin, with its counter-intuitive q, x, & c, while the Chinese are welcome to use pinyin to help educate their people, it’s silly for anglophones to have to use it, when a lot of the spellings don’t make sense to us.
Although since most of us can’t pronounce the tones, we’re mispronouncing most of the words anyway.
In fact, there’s still another romanization system in use in some US classrooms (not that it would be any easier for the average Joe): Gwoyeu Romatzyh Tonal Spelling
On another interesting if only vaguely related side tidbit, I asked a Chinese student what “China” is in Chinese, and, although I dont recall the word, it was COMPLETELY different from “China”. The word translates as “Middle Land”. I asked what “America” is, and the word translates as “Beautiful Land”.
This student told me China doesnt import words and that when new technology arises demanding a new word, they give it a Chinese name instead of a foreign name.
Does anybody remember “China” in Chinese? And does anybody know where the heck the western word “China” comes from?
Not quite; sometimes they use characters for the sound, but because of the characters’ original meaning, this can be confusing, and most of the time they just make up something new. Examples of this transliteration: one expression for “internet” is “yingte wang” (yingte from internet, wang=net). E-mail is often “yimei”.
As for China, yes, the Chinese name is “Zhongguo” (central kingdom). The standard explanation is “China” comes from Qin (Ch’in), the name of the dynasty that first unified the country under a single ruler in 221 B.C.