感谢Mark Swofford 先生的拼音网站,把拼音用做学习中文的工具.我祝贺Swofford 先生的工作获得成功!

语言使人有别于禽兽，
文字使文明别于野蛮，
教育使先进有别于落后。

周有光
2012-03-02
时年107岁

Gǎnxiè Mark Swofford xiānsheng de pīnyīn wǎngzhàn, bǎ pīnyīn yòngzuò xuéxí Zhōngwén de gōngjù. Wǒ zhùhè Swofford xiānsheng de gōngzuò huòdé chénggōng!

Yǔyán shǐrén yǒubié yú qínshòu,
wénzì shǐ wénmíng bié yú yěmán,
jiàoyù shǐ xiānjìn yǒubié yú luòhòu.

Zhōu Yǒuguāng
2012-03-02
shí nián 107 suì

This profile focuses not only on Zhou’s role in the creation of Hanyu Pinyin but also on his political views, which he has become increasingly public with.

About Mao, he said in an interview: “I deny he did any good.” About the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre: “I am sure one day justice will be done.” About popular support for the Communist Party: “The people have no freedom to express themselves, so we cannot know.”

As for fostering creativity in the Communist system, Mr. Zhou had this to say, in a 2010 book of essays: “Inventions are flowers that grow out of the soil of freedom. Innovation and invention don’t grow out of the government’s orders.”

No sooner had the first batch of copies been printed than the book was banned in China.

Although the reporter’s assertion, following the PRC’s official figures, that “China all but stamp[ed] out illiteracy” is well wide of the mark, there is no denying Pinyin’s crucial role in this area. I recommend reading the whole article.

Here’s the basic idea:

The ordering is primarily simply alphabetical. Diacritical marks, punctuation, juncture and capitalization are only taken into account when the strings being compared are otherwise identical. For example, píng’ān sorts before pÄ«nyÄ«n, because pingan sorts before pinyin, because g precedes y alphabetically.

Only when two strings are alphabetically identical is non-alphabetical information taken into account.

The series’ Reader’s Guide presents the specifics of the sort order. Since I don’t have to worry about how much space this takes up on my site, I have reformatted the information slightly to give the examples as numbered lists.

Head entry transcriptions with the same sequence of letters are ordered first strictly by letter sequence regardless of tones, then by initial syllable tone in the sequence 0 1 2 3 4. For entries with the same initial tone, arrangement is by the tone of the second syllable, again in the order 0 1 2 3 4. For example:

1. shīshi
2. shīshī
3. shīshí
4. shīshǐ
5. shīshì
6. shíshī
7. shíshì
8. shǐshī
9. shìshī

Irrespective of tones, entries with the vowel u precede those with ü.
For example:

1. lú
2. lÇ”
3. lù
4. lǘ
5. lÇš
6. lǜ

1. nù
2. nÇš

Entries without apostrophe precede those with apostrophe. For example:

1. biàn — argue
2. bǐ’àn — the other shore

Lower-case entries precede upper-case entries. For example:

1. hòujìn — aftereffect
2. Hòu Jìn — Later Jin dynasty

For entries with identical spelling, including tones, arrangement is by order of frequency….

For most users, the most important thing to note is that the neutral tone is regarded as 0, not as 5. Thus, the order is not “ā á ÇŽ à a,” but “a ā á ÇŽ à.” And, because lowercase comes before uppercase, not “A a Ä€ ā Á á Ǎ ÇŽ À à” but “a A ā Ä€ á Á ÇŽ Ǎ à À.”

One can see this in action in the A entries for the ABC English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary. And here are some sample pages from an earlier ABC dictionary.

The ABC series follows the example of the Hanyu Pinyin Cihui (汉语拼音词汇 / Hànyǔ Pīnyīn Cíhuì) (example), with only one minor difference, as noted by Tom Bishop:

HPC [Hanyu Pinyin Cihui] gave hyphens and spaces the same priority as apostrophes, so that lìgōng sorted before lǐ-gōng, in spite of the tones. Usage of hyphens and spaces in pinyin is still far from being fully standardized. (The same is true in English orthography.) Consequently, for collation it makes sense to give less weight to hyphens and spaces, and more weight to tones, thus sorting lǐ-gōng before lìgōng. In ABC, hyphens and spaces don’t affect the sort order unless they change the pronunciation in the same way that apostrophe would; for example, ¹míng-àn 明暗 and ²míng’àn 冥暗 are treated as homophones, and they sort after mǐngÇŽn 敏感.

Y.R. Chao
November 3, 1892 – February 25, 1982

Today, the thirtieth anniversary of the death of the brilliant linguist and all-around interesting guy Y.R. Chao (Zhao Yuanren / Zhào Yuánrèn / 趙元任 / 赵元任), I’m remembering him by rereading some of his work. (Chao died twenty years and one day after his good friend Hu Shih.)

Here are some readings here on Pinyin.info by or about Y.R. Chao that you may wish to review:

• Responses to objections to romanization
• Y.R. Chao’s Mandarin translation (in Gwoyeu Romatzyh) of the Humpty Dumpty section of Through the Looking-Glass
• Interviews with Y.R. Chao
• Roots of the stone lions story
• Basic spelling conventions of Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GuóyÇ” LuómÇŽzì / 國語羅馬字 / 国语罗马字 )
• Chart comparing Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Hanyu Pinyin, alphabetized by GR first tone
• Y.R. Chao works being reissued
• One State, One People, One Language

Hú Shì
17 December 1891 — 24 February 1962

Today, on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Hu Shih (Hú Shì/胡適/胡适), I’d like to say a few things in his memory. This is, after all, someone I regard as a hero in many ways. I even keep a photo of him in my office.

The opening of the preface to a splendid new biography of Hu Shih covers the basics:

Hu Shi (1891–1962), “the Father of the Chinese Renaissance,” towered over China’s intellectual landscape in the first half of the twentieth century. Among other achievements, he is credited with having made everyday speech respectable as a medium of written communication. Groomed as a traditional scholar-bureaucrat in his father’s footsteps, he had already turned into an iconoclastic renegade by the time he left Shanghai at the age of eighteen to study in the United States. In John Dewey, whose approach to philosophy was to treat all doctrines as working hypotheses, Hu felt he found “the proper way to think.” He and his associates who studied with Dewey at Columbia University established the framework of China’s modern educational system. A dedicated humanist, social reformer and promoter of women rights, he was, at different periods of his life, president of Peking University, president of the Academia Sinica, and ambassador to Washington.

To return to the most important point, at least in terms of the focus of this site, it was he, more than anyone else, who helped break the stranglehold of Literary Sinitic (a.k.a. classical Chinese). The vernacular movement he spearheaded is of far greater significance and has had a much greater impact on Chinese culture and people’s lives than so-called character simplification. Yet it receives relatively little attention, perhaps because many do not understand — or do not want to admit — how very different Literary Sinitic is from modern standard Mandarin.

Hu Shih is also the one who, more than anyone else, popularized the use of modern punctuation in Chinese texts, such as through his book Zhōngguó Zhéxuéshǐ Dàgāng and his editions of earlier works. That alone should be enough to earn him the eternal gratitude of all who read texts written in Chinese characters.

There’s so much more to the man than this, though most of it falls outside the bounds of this site. So rather than go into it here I will just encourage people to read more by and about him.

Shortly after Hu Shih’s death his son wrote:

father passed away during a cocktail party in honor of the members of the Academia Sinica after the completion of the members’ meeting. He passed away without any pain, and from every one present at the party, I gathered that he died happy, for the last words he said was, “Let’s have some drinks!”

I lift my glass.

Further reading:

• Hú Shì, Chángshì jí (《嘗試集》)
• Hu Shih Memorial Hall
• the biography mentioned above: A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit——The Half-Century Romance of Hu Shi and Edith Clifford Williams, by Susan Chan Egan & Chih-p’ing Chou (Google Books)
• another link to the same book: A Pragmatist and His Free Spirit on Amazon

Brill — a Leiden-based publisher of work in the humanities, social sciences, law, and science — has released “the Brill,” a new font family designed to support the Latin and Greek scripts “to the fullest extent possible.” IPA and the Slavic parts of the Cyrillic range are also covered. This can handle the needs of just about any romanized script, including Hanyu Pinyin.

As someone with Brill explained to me:

Instead of limiting the fonts’ character set to known characters and character-plus-diacritic combinations, we chose a dynamic model in which, using OpenType GPOS features, any base character can carry any diacritic above or below it, and in which diacritics can be stacked as well—not forgetting all the precomposed characters that are already present in the Unicode Standard, of course. Finally, a huge assortment of punctuation marks, editorial marks, and other symbols known to occur in Brill publications were added to the spec.

In total, the Brill contains more than 5,100 characters. And that already immense range can be extended through combining diacritics, as noted above.

Even better, the Brill is free for non-commercial use. You can download it after agreeing to the End User License Agreement license. (See the bottom of that page and then the bottom of the page that follows.)

The Brill is available now in roman and italic styles. Bold and bold italic versions will be released later this year, probably before July.

The Brill is considerably different than Brill Online, which has been available for some time and was aimed at helping users of Brill’s online reference works. Brill Online is based on v. 1.00 of the Gentium family of fonts. The glyph set was extended to support some very rare characters, such as Aegean numbers. “In essence it became a hybrid Latin-Greek-Cyrillic-IPA and ‘pi’ font family.”

Thanks to Lin Ai of Zhongweb.net for the heads up that this had been released, and to Dominique de Roo and Pim Rietbroek of Brill for patiently helping me with my questions.

Classy.

But it was all for a good cause, of course. You see, the Mandarin expression chuÄ« lÇŽba, when not referring to the literal playing of a trumpet, is usually taken in Taiwan to refer to a blow job. But in China, Ma explained, chuÄ« lÇŽba means the same thing as the idiom pāi mÇŽpì (pat/kiss the horse’s ass — i.e., flatter). And now that we have the handy-dandy Zhōnghuá YÇ”wén ZhÄ«shikù (Chinese Language Database), which Ma was announcing, we can look up how Mandarin differs in Taiwan and China, and thus not get tripped up by such misunderstandings. Or at least that’s supposed to be the idea.

The database, which is the result of cross-strait cooperation, can be accessed via two sites: one in Taiwan, the other in China.

It’s clear that a lot of money has been spent on this. For example, many entries are accompanied by well-documented, precise explanations by distinguished lexicographers. Ha! Just kidding! Many entries are really accompanied by videos — some two hundred of them — of cutesy puppets gabbing about cross-strait differences in Mandarin expressions. But if there’s a video in there of the panda in the skirt explaining to the sheep in the vest that a useful skill for getting ahead in Chinese society is chuÄ« lÇŽba, I haven’t found it yet. Will NMA will take up the challenge?

Much of the site emphasizes not so much language as Chinese characters. For example, another expensively produced video feeds the ideographic myth by showing off obscure Hanzi, such as the one for chěng.

WARNING: The screenshot below links to a video that contains scenes with intense wawa-ing and thus may not be suitable for anyone who thinks it’s not really cute for grown women to try to sound like they’re only thwee-and-a-half years old.

In a welcome bit of synchronicity, Victor Mair posted on Language Log earlier the same week on the unpredictability of Chinese character formation and pronunciation, briefly discussing just such patterns of duplication, triplication, etc.

Mair notes:

Most of these characters are of relatively low frequency and, except for a few of them, neither their meanings nor their pronunciations are known by persons of average literacy.

Many more such characters consisting or two, three, or four repetitions of the same character exist, and their sounds and meanings are in most cases equally or more opaque.

The Hanzi for chÄ›ng (which looks like 馬馬馬 run together as one character) in the video above is sufficiently obscure that it likely won’t be shown correctly in many browsers on most systems when written in real text: 𩧢. But never fear: It’s already in Unicode and so should be appearing one of these years in a massively bloated system font.

Further reinforcing the impression that the focus is on Chinese characters, Liú Zhàoxuán, who is the head of the association in charge of the project on the Taiwan side, equated traditional Chinese characters with Chinese culture itself and declared that getting the masses in China to recognize them is an important mission. (Liu really needs to read Lü Shuxiang’s “Comparing Chinese Characters and a Chinese Spelling Script — an evening conversation on the reform of Chinese characters.”)

Then he went on about how Chinese characters are a great system because, supposedly, they have a one-to-one correspondence with language that other scripts cannot match and people can know what they mean by looking at them (!) and that they therefore have a high degree of artistic quality (gāodù de yìshùxìng). Basically, the person in charge of this project seems to have a bad case of the Like Wow syndrome, which is not a reassuring trait for someone in charge of producing a dictionary.

The same cooperation that built the Web sites led to a new book, LiÇŽng’àn MÄ›irì YÄ« Cí (《兩岸每日一詞》 / Roughly: Cross-Strait Term-a-Day Book), which was also touted at the press conference.

The book contains Hanyu Pinyin, as well as zhuyin fuhao. But, alas, the book makes the Pinyin look ugly and fails completely at the first rule of Pinyin: use word parsing. (In the online images from the book, such as the one below, all of the words are se pa ra ted in to syl la bles.)

The Web site also has ugly Pinyin, with the CSS file for the Taiwan site calling for Pinyin to be shown in SimSun, which is one of the fonts it’s better not to use for Pinyin. But the word parsing on the Web site is at least not always wrong. Here are a few examples.

• “跑神兒” is given as pÇŽoshénr (good).
• And apostrophes appear to be used correctly: e.g., fàn’ān (販安), chÅ«n’ān (春安), and fÄ“i’ān (飛安).
• But “第二春” is run together as “dìèrchÅ«n” (no hyphen) rather than as shown correctly as dì-èr chÅ«n.
• And “一個頭兩個大” is given as yíɡe tóu liÇŽnÉ¡É¡e dà (for Taiwan) and yÄ«É¡e tóu liÇŽnÉ¡É¡e dà (for China). But ge is supposed to be written separately. (The variation of tone for yi is in this case useful.)

Still, my general impression from this is that we should not expect the forthcoming cross-strait dictionary to be very good.

Further reading:

• MÇŽ zÇ’ngtÇ’ng: fāzhÇŽn liÇŽng’àn tōngyòng wénzì (馬總統：發展兩岸通用文字), China Times, February 9, 2012
• Ma applauds cross-strait online Chinese dictionary, Taipei Times, February 9, 2012
• Online databases detail cross-strait languages, China Post, February 9, 2012
• ZÇ’ngtÇ’ng: Zhōngguó “chuÄ« lÇŽba” dÄ›ngyú Táiwān “pāi mÇŽpì” (總統：中國「吹喇叭」等於台灣「拍馬屁」), Yam News, February 8, 2012

Biolinum is designed for emphasis, e.g. of titles. You can also use it for short passages of text. For longer texts a serif font such as the Libertine should be used for readability. The Biolinum has the same vertical metrics and visual weight as the Libertine, so that it fits perfectly to the Libertine and can be also used for emphasizing within the body text.

Linux Biolinum Capitals and Linux Biolinum Keyboard don’t presently work with Pinyin. But the other styles do, as this sample of Linux Biolinum with Pinyin text shows.

In his 1902 book China and the Chinese, Herbert A. Giles (of Wade-Giles fame) pointed out the flaw he had seen in some earlier work.

Even the early Jesuit Fathers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom we owe so much for pioneer work in the domain of Sinology, were not without occasional lapses of the kind, due no doubt to a laudable if excessive zeal. Finding the character 船, which is the common word for “a ship,” as indicated by 舟, the earlier picture-character for “boat” seen on the left-hand side, one ingenious Father proceeded to analyse it as follows: —

舟 “ship,” å…« “eight,” 口 “mouth” = eight mouths on a ship—“the Ark.”

But the right-hand portion is merely the phonetic of the character; it was originally é“… “lead,” which gave the sound required; then the indicator “boat” was substituted for “metal.”

So with the word 禁 “to prohibit.” Because it could be analysed into two 木木 “trees” and 示 “a divine proclamation,” an allusion was discovered therein to the two trees and the proclamation of the Garden of Eden; whereas again the proper analysis is into indicator and phonetic.

Nor is such misplaced ingenuity confined to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1892 a Protestant missionary published and circulated broadcast what he said was “evidence in favour of the Gospels,” being nothing less than a prophecy of Christ’s coming hidden in the Chinese character 來 “to come.” He pointed out that this was composed of “a cross,” with two 人人 ‘men,’ one on each side, and a ‘greater man’ 人 in the middle.

That analysis is all very well for the character as it stands now; but before the Christian era this same character was written and was a picture, not of men and of a cross, but of a sheaf of corn. It came to mean “come,” says the Chinese etymologist, “because corn comes from heaven.”

Even if all the character etymologies Giles cites are not necessarily in keeping with modern scholarship, his principles here are correct.

additional sample

Number of U.S. students studying abroad, by destination and year

By far the largest gains of destinations in the top 25 were those by Israel (60.7% — up to 3,146 visiting students) and India (44.4% — up to 3,884). Though not in the top 25, Taiwan also experienced very strong growth at 42.4% (850 students) — far higher than any other country in East Asia.

In second place for growth in East Asia was Japan (6.6%), which will soon replace Costa Rica in the top 10 if trends continue.

For places of origin of international students studying in the United States, China was by far the leader, with 157,558 students, about 50% more than India’s 103,895 students in the States. Third and fourth places were held by South Korea and Canada, respectively. Taiwan was fifth with 24,818 students.

Source:

• Open Doors Data

Previous posts on this subject:

• China and U.S. study abroad programs, Pinyin News, February 7, 2011
• China and U.S. study abroad programs: update, Pinyin News, January 8, 2010
• China and U.S. study abroad programs, Pinyin News, November 23, 2008

Text source: I very want your deceitful surface, Pinyin News, October 13, 2005.

It goes through the letters of the alphabet: A is for ānchun, B is for bānmǎ, C is for chángjǐnglù, etc., all the way through Z, which is for zhāngyú.

But X is not for xióngmāo. I’m sick of pandas. Let’s let some other animals have some time in the spotlight.

Although technically speaking the Pinyin alphabet is the same as that for English, I prefer to go with A–Z, minus V but plus Ãœ.

O and R were the tricky ones to find animals for.

Perhaps some teachers will print this out and hang it up in their classrooms. Or kids could use it as a coloring book. You have my permission to do just about anything you like with this — other than add Chinese characters. (The world already has plenty of material in Hanzi, but not nearly enough in Pinyin.)

I made sure to include multiples of some common morphemes (e.g., bānmÇŽ, hÇŽimÇŽ, and mÇŽ; èyú and zhāngyú; hÇŽimÇŽ and hÇŽi’ōu; niú, wōniú, and xÄ«niú), which I hope will be useful.

For fonts, I used the Linux Libertine family.

This took me far longer to make than I thought it would, so I hope some people enjoy it or at least find it interesting.

Here’s how those working on Linux Libertine describe it:

We work on a versatile font family. It is designed to give you an alternative for fonts like T*mes New Roman. We’re creating free software and publish our fonts under terms of the GPL and OFL. Please have a look at the paragraph concerning the license.

It is our aim to support the many western languages and provide many special characters. Our fonts cover the codepages of Western Latin, Greek, Cyrillic (with their specific enhancements), Hebrew, IPA and many more. Furthermore, typographical features such as ligatures, small capitals, different number styles, scientific symbols, etc. are implemented in this font. Linux Libertine thus contains more than 2000 characters.

Here’s what it looks like with Pinyin. (Click to view a PDF, which is much clearer.)

All in all: Not bad.