Hanyu Pinyin and proper nouns

cover of Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and OrthographyThe first large section from Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography to go online is the one on proper nouns (2 MB PDF).

  1. Introduction
  2. Place Names
  3. Personal Names
    1. formal names
    2. non-formal names
    3. forms of address
  4. Transliteration of Foreign Place Names and Personal Names
  5. Other Proper Nouns
    1. names of nationalities
    2. names of religions and deities
    3. names of dynasties
    4. names of festivals and holidays
    5. names of celestial bodies
    6. names of languages
    7. titles of literary and artistic works
    8. titles of newspapers and magazines
    9. names of social units
    10. trademarks
  6. Proper Nouns in Combination with Common Nouns

Thus, these rules cover many of the applications of Pinyin that appear on signage.

I’ll post a version with OCR later (probably weeks or months rather than days). In the meanwhile, you can use the bookmarks within the PDF file to navigate the document.

further reading:

Park Street redux

As some of you may recall, last October I wrote about finding official signs for a Taipei street that used English rather than romanization (Street names in English translation: trend or error?).

Some of the signs for what is written in Hanzi “園區街” (Yuánqū Jiē) read, in Taipei’s standard but stupid InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion, “YuanQu St.” while others read “Park St.” (which, by the way, is a misleading translation). I called the Taipei City Government about this and was informed that Park was an error and that the signs would be fixed to read Yuanqu.

Nearly a year has gone by since then. Have any of the street signs been changed?

The answer is yes. The signs, including some new ones, are indeed consistent. All of them now read — have you guessed it yet? — “Park St.”

That’s right: They eliminated the signs that were correct and put up new signs that are wrong. I’m trying to relax, so I won’t write out all of the many maledictions I have been muttering about Taipei City Government and its bureaucracy.

Here’s one of the street signs in October 2007:
YuanQu St.

Here’s the same sign in August 2008:
Park St.

A close-up, showing how “Park” was pasted over “YuanQu”.
closeup of the sign, showing how 'Park' was pasted over 'YuanQu'

Whither Taiwan’s English renamings?

Those working in the new administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (Mǎ Yīngjiǔ) are people with priorities. For example, they certainly didn’t waste any time removing the Chinese characters for “Taiwan” from the Web site of the presidential office, as this happened on his first day in office. On the other hand, they didn’t bother with other things, like having the current year be 2008 instead of “108.”

From a screen shot taken a couple of nights ago:
screenshot from the website of the Office of the President, showing that the date script *still* hasn't been fixed (with the year given as '108' instead of '2008')

From a screen shot taken about two-and-a-half years ago:
screenshot from the website of the Office of the President, showing that the date as '106-01-02' for January 2, 2006

(FWIW, I told a meeting of government webmasters three years ago that the date script needed fixing — or, better still, deletion. Are they really under the impression that lots of people visit the presidential office’s Web site or that of any other Taiwan governmental agency to check the date and time?)

Also, given what the head of the ruling party recently said in the glorious motherland China, perhaps they might want to replace “Office of the President” with “Office of Mr. Ma.”

At any rate, how things are named is a concern of the current administration, just as it was for the previous one. I’ve given up trying to follow the twists and turns of the name of Revere the Bloody Dictator Shrine Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall. Someone let me know when the dust finally settles.

And then there’s the airport. The last time I was on a highway in Taoyuan I noticed that the signs that previously said “CKS Airport” had the “CKS” covered, so they read simply “Airport”. Maybe the new administration can live with that, regardless of what it does about the signage of the airport itself.

But what is to become of the official names that weren’t changed in Mandarin but only in English? Please note that I’m not talking about romanizations but about real English names. I’m referring to how the English names of several ministries and other government agencies were changed during President Chen Shui-bian’s two terms in office, though the Mandarin names remained the same.

For example:

Mandarin Name English Name
Pre DPP Current (March 2008)
Yuánzhùmín Wěiyuánhuì Council of Aboriginal Affairs Council of Indigenous Peoples
Guóyǔhuì Mandarin Promotion Council National Languages Committee
Zhōnghuá Mínguó Duìwài Màoyì Fāzhǎn Xiéhuì China External Trade Development Council (CETRA) Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA)
Qiáowù Wěiyuánhuì Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission

None of the above revised names have been revoked or changed as of today (June 12, 2008 — or 108-06-12, as the Presidential Office would have it).

What about the addresses of the Web sites of these ministries and agencies?

name URL comments
Council of Indigenous Peoples www.apc.gov.tw APC? According to someone I spoke with at the council, this stands for “Aboriginal People’s Commission” (or maybe “Aboriginal Peoples’ Commission”), a name that dates back to 1996. But I can’t find any search results for that name within .tw domains. Also, neither www.cip.gov.tw nor www.cip.gov.tw leads to anything. But lately the APC site has often been unresponsive. I mentioned to the council that they might want an updated URL; the person I spoke with said she’d look into it.
National Languages Committee www.edu.tw/MANDR/ This is under the Ministry of Education, which has changed the URL a few times over the years but has yet to revise the focus in the address on Mandarin (i.e., “MANDR”). Not even under the DPP was this address subject to rectification (zhèngmíng, 正名 ).
Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) www.taitra.org.tw The old URL of www.cetra.org.tw leads to nothing, not even a redirect. www.taitra.com.tw mirrors the .org.tw address. This doesn’t have a .gov.tw address because it’s a semi-governmental organization.
Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission www.ocac.gov.tw “Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission” and “Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission” share the same abbreviation. One URL fits all.

Thus, so far the new English names have survived.

Gaoxiong street signs

Sinle StDuring an extremely brief trip a few weeks ago to Gāoxióng, Taiwan’s second-largest city, I was able to grab a few photos of signage there. Most of these were taken from a moving taxi; thus the poor quality and lack of much diversity. But these are the best I could do under the circumstances.

First, a few basic points:

  • they’re in Tongyong Pinyin (bleah — but at least they’re consistent)
  • they don’t use InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion (This lack is, of course, a good thing. If only Taipei hadn’t screwed this up!)
  • in most cases the text in romanization is large enough to read even at a distance (Very good — unlike all too many relatively recent signs elsewhere, such as Taipei County.)

In short, other than the choice of romanization most of these signs aren’t all that bad. They’re certainly much better (and more consistent) than the ones that Taipei County put up in Tongyong Pinyin a few years ago. (Although Taipei County’s current magistrate said more than two years ago that he was in favor of switching to Hanyu Pinyin, as far as I can see he has done absolutely nothing about this. Of course, some might say that he’s done absolutely nothing about anything; but I’ll leave discussion of that to the political blogs.)

Here’s another Gāoxióng sign with romanization that isn’t too small.
Dacheng St.

I’m not a fan of the practice of force-justifying the Chinese characters and romanization/English to the same width. This style can be seen in many of these signs. Sometimes this results in the romanized/English words being spaced too far apart; more often, though, the Chinese characters are left with lots of space between them — so much space that it would be easy to have spaces indicate word divisions for the texts in Hanzi (something Y.R. Chao recommended nearly a century ago), which might be an interesting thing to try on signs. I wonder if anyone has ever performed any experiments on this.

The full Mandarin name of the school indicated by the blue sign on the left is rather long:

Gāoxióng shìlì Gāoxióng nǚzǐ gāojí zhōngxué
(高雄市立高雄女子高級中學)

Whoever made the sign wisely desided to cut that down to 高雄女中 (Gāoxióng nǚ zhōng). If only someone had realized that it would have been better to use something shorter than the full English name, too. “Kaohsiung Municipal Girls’ Senior High School” is a lot to fit on one small sign. “Kaohsiung Girls’ High School”, “Girls’ Municipal High School”, or something even shorter would have been much better.

Here are some more signs.

And finally an address plate on a building. This style could certainly be better.
Dayi St.

Mandarin newspaper with Pinyin

Victor Mair’s latest post at Language Log introduces a new U.S.-based newspaper, the Huayu Xuebao (Mandarin Learning Newspaper, 華語學報), which is similar to Taiwan’s Guoyu Ribao (Mandarin Daily News), the main difference being the former uses Hanyu Pinyin while the latter uses zhuyin fuhao (bopo mofo).

Well, actually the Huayu Xuebao doesn’t use proper Pinyin (see recent remarks). But I’m so happy to see this long-needed paper that I’ll hold my tongue for now.

Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t have its Web site ready yet — not that the long-established Guoyu Ribao is much better at that, at least when it comes to texts as they appear in the newspaper. So, for more information about the Huayu Xuebao, write learningnewspaper [AT] yahoo.com or phone +1-201-288-9188 (New Jersey).

There’s also a sample issue.

source: How to learn to read Chinese, Language Log, May 25, 2008

major paper on Crazy English released

The new work I promised on Li Yang and his Crazy English method has finally been published and is available for free on the Web: A Survey of Li Yang Crazy English (2.6 MB PDF), by Amber R. Woodward.

For a little more on this, see Victor Mair’s recent post on Language Log: Crazy English again.

This paper, which is some 70 pages long, includes photos and even videos.

Here’s the table of contents:

  • Preface
  • Abstract
  • Li Yang: The Man
    • Li Yang’s Background
    • The Establishment of Li Yang Crazy English
  • Crazy English: The Method
    • Precursors to Crazy English
    • Crazy English Pedagogical Method
    • Crazy English Psychological Method
    • The Potential for Success of the Crazy English Method
  • Li Yang Crazy English Politics: The Madness
    • Li Yang’s Personal Ideology
    • Zhang Yuan’s 1999 Documentary, Crazy English
    • Crazy English Publicity
    • Government Response to Li Yang
    • Connection between the Method and the Madness
  • Appendix
    • Survey on Li Yang and Crazy English
    • Transcript of Time Asia Interview
    • Transcript of Li’s Responses to Criticism
    • Pictures of Li Yang Crazy English
  • Bibliography

This is issue no. 180 of Sino-Platonic Papers.

Further reading:

more Crazy English

A couple of days ago I promised a “long, critical study of Crazy English” will be released soon. It’s still in preparation. But you can now read a study from a couple of years ago by Amber Woodward, the same author who wrote the forthcoming piece. The 2006 study is Learning English, Losing Face, and Taking Over: The Method (or Madness) of Li Yang and His Crazy English.

The article prominently quotes a comment added to a post here on Pinyin News. So comment away, everyone, cuz you just might end up in an international journal.

This is issue no. 170 of Sino-Platonic Papers.

further reading:

Tibetan-English sample sentences

It seems like a good time for something related to Tibet.

The newest rerelease from Sino-Platonic Papers comprises 900 sample sentences in romanized Tibetan and English, the Tibetan being specifically Kham Tibetan.

From the introduction:

The reader is undoubtedly aware that written Tibetan radically differs from what is spoken and that there are also many differences in, for example, written Tibetan in Amdo regions and that of Lhasa. The value of this material is that it presents one of the most widely used Tibetan dialects as it is actually spoken.

Renchin-Jashe, a native of Yulshul (Yushu) Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture in Qinghai Province where Kham is spoken, wrote these sentences using a system that he devised. I then edited the sentences…. We have tried throughout to present sentences that reflect Tibetan culture.

This issue is Kham Tibetan Language Materials (2.7 MB PDF), by Renchin-Jashe and Kevin Stuart.

Here are the first 15 of the 900 sentences.

  1. Qa e tel.
    Hello.
  2. Chou ghale-jiele en?
    Is your life well?
  3. Nga Norbu Sangbho yin.
    I’m Norbu Sangbho.
  4. Chou Doje e rei?
    Are you Doje?
  5. Nga yin.
    Yes, I am.
  6. Chou dhemo yin nam?
    How are you?
  7. Nga dhemo yin, tujeche.
    Fine, thanks.
  8. Droma dhele ghale e ree?
    How is Droma?
  9. Mo ni dhele ghale ree tujeche.
    She is very well, thank you.
  10. Chou dhehi eyou, Avo Qalsang?
    How are you, Mr. Qalsang?
  11. Ghongmo zang, Ashe Yudron.
    Good evening, Ms. Yudron.
  12. Ghong mo chou dhemo en?
    How are you this evening?
  13. Da do nub dhe mo jie Tshering.
    Good night Tshering.
  14. Ghashou, Dondrub.
    Good-bye, Dondrub.
  15. Sang nyin tutree zei.
    See you tomorrow.

The work also contains a guide to pronunciation and sentences for learners at the intermediate level.

It was first published in November 1993 as issue no. 42 of Sino-Platonic Papers.