You may find the Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den enlightening.
In it, every word in the poem can essentially be represented in pinyin as “shi” even though they actually are distinct.
You should put in a complaint with the People’s Commissariat of Language.
I don’t find it annoying. I happily introduce myself in Japan using the Japanese version of my name, in which l is replaced with r. The Japanese version is official here for family registration, work, etc.
In fact my work e-mail address uses the Romanised transliteration of the Japanese transliteration of my name, rather than the original English spelling.
So should each country (and indeed, regional accent) have it’s own transliteration system? Would my buddy (Tian Wen) become Tienne Wen in France? And do you actually have any solution for the many sounds that don’t exist in various given languages, such as the Pinyin “c” and “r” and “x”, which do not have any way to write in English?
Can you see that we would still be making up approximations? Your proposal doesn’t solve any problems, and fractures the one stab at consistently we have.
Pinyin has the advantage that it is a very consistent, functionally useful, globally relevant way of managing the issue, so that when does a business trip hitting the Philippines, Zimbabwe and Mexico, he doesn’t have to figure out twenty different versions of his name to write on the customs forms. It takes maybe 20 minutes to learn sufficient Pinyin to where you will never completely screw up a Chinese word again (although there are maybe five tough sounds that you may have to just approximate). There are no doubt one million YouTube videos that can teach anyone how to do it.
Take out the part about regional accents and my answer is yet.
There isn’t anything novel about this.
Синюгин is transliterated as Siniouguine in France and as Sinyugin in English. Many historical figures have names that are spelled differently in different languages.
But I make a distinction between personal names of currently living human beings and other kinds of words. Your buddy Tian Wen is a person and it would be confusing for him, and perhaps legally difficult, for the spelling of his name to be so fluid.
By contrast, there is no problem with the name of a city, country, or other non-person entity being spelled differently in every different language. Look at how many different names there are for Germany.
I’m not sure exactly what you’re asking. I don’t propose to have a solution that forces English-only speakers to recognize and distinguish sounds that are not phonemic and I don’t think any such solution is necessary.
And I don’t think there is really any point to try very hard in establishing an orthographic distinction among such non-phonemic sounds when transliterating, say, from Chinese to English. Transliteration is not transcription. It doesn’t requires solving all these problems.
And, again, for the purposes of transliteration, I would not repurpose “extra” letters like C, X, Q, etc., when transliterating from Chinese to English, when those uses clash with general English orthography.
Again, those problems might be problems for transcription, but they are not problems that need be addressed by transliteration.
Consistency of spelling between languages is not a priority for me.
Again, all this might be relevant to a person named Tian Wen. None of it gets me excited or interested when we’re talking about transliterating words that are not names of people.
And when we are talking about a person named Tian Wen, he or she can choose whatever spelling he desires. So long as it appears consistently in his or her personal legal documents, it doesn’t matter whether it conforms to any regularized system of transliteration at all.
And, I might add, that doesn’t mean that news reports, for example, necessarily need shy away from alternative spellings based on differing orthographic principles. There’s no need to make internationally uniform the spellings of the names of Mao Tse-tung and Chiang Kai-shek, for example, especially now that they are dead and don’t have to worry about making flight connections in Manila, Mexico City, and Harare.
Even for place names, your system is needlessly confusing.
In China, I lived near (Chongqing). If I send a package to that area, I address it to Chongqing. If I get on a bus, I get on the bus that says “Chongqing” on the sign. When I drive, I follow the road signs telling me how far away Chongqing is. When I read Chinese English-language newspapers, I read about events in Chongqing. When I visit my teacher friends, I go to Chongqing University. When I look something up on Google maps, I look up Chongqing. And this works for everyone- the Chinese kid learning to read, the American foreign teacher, the German technical advisor, the French tourist, the Russian businessman…We all know what Chonqing means.
What value does it add for me to spend my whole life thinking of it as Chungking, and having to basically re-translate it when I want to use the word in a practical context? Why make up some new word, when there is a perfectly useable name that everyone understands? It’s a pain in the butt enough to explain the situation to people who grew up with Chungking and don’t connect the dots. Why perpetuate it?
There was a time when we lived in relatively isolated nations with minimal education systems. For a while, most communities called themselves something like “The People” and everyone else something along the lines of “Those funny sounding people on the other side of the river.” As we got slightly more cosmopolitan, we started calling people bastardized, filtered down versions of what they call themselves. London become Londres to the French, and Roma became Rome to the British. These names have been around so long that there is no changing them.
But 100 years ago, the bustling city of (Guangzhou) was a not particularly notable port town that few people outside of area worried much about. It didn’t really matter if we called it the rather bizarre “Canton” (apparently derived from a Portuguese bastardization of the Guangdong region in which Guangzhou resides) because few people had any real connection to it or reason to speak about it. Today, it is a city of 13 million people and one of the largest drivers of the global economy. In today’s globalized, interconnected world, teaching people to call it some random word that nobody else understands makes absolutely no sense, and is actively detrimental to American business interests as it at worst leads to confusion and at best makes us look like a bunch of Anglo-centric rubes. So we can either go with a phonetic-ish approximation that is aligned with whatever accent in English is in favor at the time, or we can just use the also reasonably phonetic approximation that is actually used there and makes sense to everyone around the world and actually helps you when you are at the Bangkok airport and trying to figure out which plane to get on to go to .
If you are savvy enough to get from the United States to a bus in China, this isn’t a problem for you. Human beings are naturally multi-lingual. This is just another aspect of multi-lingualism.
That is not transliteration, but transcription. Transliteration means a one/one relationship between the spelling in one alphabet and how it’s rendered in another. Although this would only work in a perfect world. In this example ю would be ju in a Latin alphabet.
It would if you’re Swedish or German or Polish (or using IPA). For English speakers, ю is yu.* If you google “Yuri Gagarin” you’ll find pages in English. You’d use the spelling “Juri Gagarin” to get pages in German, Polish, Swedish, etc., but English not so much.
*Except in Library of Congress romanization, where it’s “iu” with a curved line above the letters to connect them. Hello, IUri.
Spoken like someone who has never travelled around China with their mother.
“Ok, Mom, we are going to change trains in Chongqing.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, just a little town of twenty million people.”
“Funny, I’ve never heard of it.”
“Yes you have. It used to be called Chungking.”
“Ohhhhhh…”
some time later
“Okay, it looks like our train leaves from platform 9.”
"But I thought we were going to Chungking?
“We are. Platform 9. Come on, it leaves in five…”
“Are you sure this is right? It says there ‘chawng-quinn-gggg’”
“That’s where we are going…”
“But I thought…”
Head smack
Now that working with an in China is an everyday reality in many industries, it is absolutely pointless for us to use our own ideosyncratic set of approximations (which people are still going to get wrong, because we can’t actually phonetically spell many of these words in English because the sounds don’t exist AND English is not an exceptionally phonetic language so people are going to find a way to pronounce “Peiching” as “Pee-Chin-g” or something) when there is a perfectly good set of idiosyncratic set of approximations that doesn’t leave US travelers changing planes in Bangkok or Moscow wandering around looking hopelessly for the plane to “Sui-Chou”.
And as a result, your mom landed in a Burmese prison for 15 years. No, actually you got through it with no more worry than an amusing anecdote about your mom.
Which are all arguments for avoiding Pinyin.
That doesn’t mean that it’s rationale to strip away all parameters at all in English orthography. The way that Pinyin uses B C D G J Q R X and Z makes it so deviant from English orthography that it’s prrverse to ape the system just for a Roderick Spodeian devotion to uniformity and order.
As a result, she looked like a completely clueless rube, wandering around thinking these archaic terms that have been out of fashion for fifty years are relevant to modern mainland China. And this despite being smart, well-travelled, and actually pretty well read (but with a taste for nostalgic diaspora writers and conservative historians)
This is fine going on vacation with her daughter. But it’d be an outright embarrassment meeting with business partners, or as an exchange student introducing themselves to their host family, or a young family setting up shop in Beijing. And while it’s not the end of the world, it’s a completely and totally unnecessary complication that makes us look very out of touch, when the rest of the world is busy doing business with China rather than pretending to be in the 1920s.
What do you propose? In Wade-Giles, my host city of Yibin would be written I-Pin, which is equally ridiculous, inaccurate, and unhelpful. The word that convinced me to stop learning Mandarin and focus on SIchuanhua was “re” (hot), which I honestly still cannot pronounce, and I have no concept on how you’d begin to write that sounds in a way that makes any sort of immediate sense to Anglophones.
Anyway, that’s my hill and I’m gonna die on it. If you have to be slightly arbitrary with a handful of sounds, you might as well be arbitrary in the way that is globally understood.
I approve this message. I do wish you would contact the Government of Thailand and explain the system to them. It’s not unusual to see the same Thai city name transliterated into the Latin alphabet three or more different ways.
As just one example, a few years ago it was decided that the old Bangkok Airport, Don Muang, had been misspelling its name for decades and henceforth should be (with non-trivial cost for sign-changing, etc.) Don Mueang (or is that Don Meuang? With the change, this 3rd spelling is coming into vogue as more phonetic than the government spelling. :smack: ) What makes the change insanely ridiculous is that the “Muang” in “Don Muang” is a very common place-name word meaning “City” – are all the other cities now expected to change their transliterated spellings as well?
(Of course, given the travestied relationship between this old airport and the New Airport built over decades at a corruption cost of billions and guaranteed by the Thai political Party That Loves Thais So Very Very Much™, the name change is rather the least of worries.)
Thing is, dying on a hill usually happens because of stubbornness and not because the person was right.
The thing you don’t seem to get is that Pinyin doesn’t solve any of those problems. In fact, you are intentionally making them worse, by wanting nearly every sound not to correspond with any language with a Roman alphabet.
There are indeed mostly unambiguous ways of spelling words in English. Yes, it would mean a lack of specificity. But at least what you say would sound somewhat similar, and you wouldn’t run into your mom’s problem. What she said would have sounded closer to what the real name is, and you would have understood it more readily.
Also, if anyone cares about the most appropriate transliteration of the Vietnamese name in the OP, it’s Nwin (or Nwinn). Yeah, it’s not precisely correct, but neither was Nguyen, since removing those diacritics makes it impossible to get the precision necessary. And it has the advantage of being just as close to the correct pronunciation in nearly every language that uses the Roman alphabet.
In my opinion, we should either spell it with the diacritics, or spell it “Nwin.” I only stick with Nguyen for convention, as well as the fact that some people have already anglicized the pronunciation of that spelling, so I don’t know if “Nwin” is actually more accurate.
BTW, I’m one of those that thinks that, when using a word in another language, you should, as much as possible, adapt to the second language’s phonemes. Keeping the phonemes of the old language when it is not your original language just sounds pretentious, like Alex Trebek when he says foreign words.
Immigration workers wrote down whatever was in the travel papers. “Ellis Island” changing someone’s last name is a myth.
And how about you deal with how the pronunciation of laughter changes when you put an s in front of it before you worry about the spelling of names having an emotional basis.
What problem do you think pinyin should solve for, pray tell?
It’s a great system for native Chinese speakers to Romanize their language. Which is what pinyin was primarily designed for.
It’s at worst not a bad system for non-native students of Chinese. (And I would argue compared with yale, wade-giles, telegraph system, zhuyinfuhao, that it’s at least as good if not better. Linguists would prefer wade-giles but I ain’t a linguist.)
It’s not a horrible system for the multitude of people that don’t speak Chinese but use/recognize a Roman alphabet. I’m open to hearing about what system would be better that works across multiple roman alphabet using languages.
You could plausibly argue that one could draft an American English system that would be superior for native American English speakers (who aren’t linguists) to make less of a butchering when attempting to pronounce Chinese than versus pinyin. But would such a system be superior for a) native Chinese speakers and b) other speakers of languages that use roman letters? Whould native Chinese speakers that don’t speak English be able to understand an American trying to pronounce Chinese words with your system?
Or is there another problem that pinyin should be solving for?
But nothing solves these problems. The only options are:
- System that kind of represents Chinese in ways that is mostly intuitive to English speakers, but is idiosyncratic and useless in China itself or anywhere else in the world.
- System that kind of represents Chinese in ways that is mostly intuitive to English speakers, and is also useful in China and around the world.
I’m one linguist with a very strong preference for Pinyin. I remember when we rapidly switched over to Pinyin when I was in college in 1979. I remember thinking, It’s about time! What took them so long? Pinyin was designed by professional linguists on sound (n.p.i.) phonetic principles. They did, on the whole, a good job with one-to-one phoneme-to-glyph matching.
My one quibble is with the Pinyin <e>, whose varying pronunciations like [ə], [ɛ], [ɤ] are hard to deduce from the spelling. Or else I’m missing something. (IANACS)
Glad to hear it. My Chinese prof, circa 1980 was a linguist, and he learned Chinese courtesy of Uncle Sugar and the Monterey Language Institute during the Korean war, and he preferred Wade-Giles. I vastly prefer pinyin and may be one of the fastest pinyin people around. My wife and kids, native Chinese speakers that learned pinyin in school, always lose when we have a contest.
Fun fact, all the Army students at Monterey had a weekly test on Fridays. Lowest score shipped out to Korean on Saturday. :o