Gwoyeu Romatzyh in the wild

Although Gwoyeu Romatzyh was technically the ROC’s official romanization system for most of the twentieth century (through 1986), it’s very seldom seen in Taiwan. The most common place for it to appear is on the side of coach buses. But here’s an example of Guoyeu Romatzyh on a shipping box for thousand-year-old eggs:

sdsdsss

SONG HUA PYIDANN

Guoyeu Romatzyh is often most easily identified by the doubled vowel in most (but not all) third-tone syllables. But this example doesn’t have any of those. The y indicates second tone (except when it doesn’t). And the doubled final n is a marker of fourth tone. (Have I ever mentioned that Gwoyeu Romatzyh often reminds me of “The Name Game“?)

In Hanyu Pinyin, songhua pyidann is sōnghuā pídàn.

Another technical point, this photo wasn’t taken in Taiwan proper but rather on Kinmen (金門), which provides an example of a romanization system older than Gwoyeu Romatzyh, older than Wade-Giles even. It’s postal romanization, which I regard as too mixed up to properly be called a system. In Hanyu Pinyin, Kinmen is Jinmen. The island is also known as Quemoy.

Xin Tang 10

I’ve just added to Pinyin.info the tenth and final issue (December 1989) of the seminal journal Xin Tang. I strongly encourage everyone to take a look at it and some of the other issues. Copies of this journal are extremely rare; but their importance is such that I’ll be putting all of them online here over the years.

cover of Xin Tang no. 10

Xin Tang 10

Although I’m giving the table of contents in English, the articles themselves are in Mandarin and written in Pinyin.

  • FEATURE ARTICLES
    • ZHOU YOUGUANG: The Next Step of Language Modernization
    • CHEN ENQUAN: Experiments Should Be Carried Out on the Phoneticization of Chinese Characters
    • LI YUAN: Romanized Chinese Must Be Finalized
    • LI PING: To Be a Promoter of Script Reform
    • ZHENG LINXI: Wu Yuzhang and Chinese Phonetic Spelling
    • ZHANG LIQING: How Should the Tones of Chinese Spelling Be Indicated?
  • LITERATURE
    • LIQING: Elephants
    • CHEN XUANYOU (Tang Period): The Wandering Soul
    • WU JINGZI (Qing Period): Third Daughter Wang
    • LU XUN: On the Collapse of Thunder Peak Pagoda
    • RUI LUOBIN: The Adventures of Chunmei and Mimi
    • COMIC DIALOGUES: Toad Drums
    • WEI YIJIN: Dreams at Twenty
    • DIAO KE: In Praise o f the Spirit of Bees
    • GE XIAOLING: A Song to the Disabled Children
    • YBY: The Story of the Magic Square
  • SHORT SKETCHES
    • DIAN EWEN: Interesting Tidbits about Script Reform Abroad
    • LI YUAN: A Few Statistics on Tones Notations in Romanized Chinese
  • LEARNING MANDARIN
    • Asking the Way
  • FROM THE EDITORS
    • Farewell to Our Readers

Xin Tang 9

The ninth issue of Xin Tang is now available here on Pinyin.info. The journal, which was published in the 1980s, is in and about romanization. By this point in its publication most everything in it was written in Hanyu Pinyin (as opposed to Gwoyeu Romatzyh or another system). Xin Tang is interesting not just as a forum in which one can read original content in Pinyin. It’s also important for the history of Pinyin itself. Over the course of its nearly decade-long run, one can see its authors (including many top people in romanization) working out Pinyin as a real script.

Xin Tang no. 9 (December 1988)

xin tang 9

Here’s an English version of the table of contents. Note that the articles themselves are, for the most part, in Mandarin.

  • Articles
    • Wang Jun: Perfecting Hanyu Pinyin and Broadening Its Use
    • Wang Naican: “Established at Age Thirty,but the Task is Heavy and the Way is Long”
    • Apollo Wu: China Needs an Alphabetical Script
    • Zhang Liqing: Must Written Chinese Have Tones Indicated?
    • Qian Yuzhi, Li Shuo: Research on Alphabetical Spelling of Tones
    • Victor H. Mair: A Letter Concerning the Compilation of an Alphabetically Ordered Dictionary
  • Pinyin and Computers
    • Guo Xiao, Chen Zhiqiang: Welcoming the Era of the Popularization of Word Processors- An Interview with Professor Zhou Youguang
    • Yin Binyong: Pinyin Computers Force People to Change Their Writing Styles
    • Wu Yue: Using a Computerized Chinese Typewriter to Help in Creative Writing
    • Jin Huishu: Few Special Spellings Are Required for “Automatic Conversion from Pinyin to Chinese Characters”
    • It Is Not Difficult to Master Pinyin Computers (report from Henan)
    • International Computer Conference Held in Toronto in 1988 (report from Canada)
  • Children’s Corner: Literature
    • Little Xie’s Long Trunk,
    • The Adventures of Chunmei and Mimi (illustrated serial by Rui Luobin),
    • Encounter beneath the Lighthouse,
    • The Oriole and the Eagle (Liqing),
    • The Fig Tree (Xu Hongxin)
  • Classical Chinese Selection
    • A Passage from the Zhuangzi
  • Learning Mandarin
    • Lesson 1: in Peking
  • Letters from Readers
  • News
    • Commemoration of the Thirtieth Anniversary of the Promulgation of the Scheme for Hanyu Pinyin Official
    • Promulgation of the Basic Orthographical Rules for Hanyu Pinyin
    • The Bilingual Pedagogical Experiment of Zhang Zhigong
    • Hangzhou Experiments with a New Pedagogy Using Pinyin
    • Announcement of a New Book: “Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography”

Zhou Youguang on politics

The New York Times has just published a profile of Zhou Youguang, who is often called “the father of Pinyin” (though he modestly prefers to stress that others worked with him): A Chinese Voice of Dissent That Took Its Time.

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.

Zhou Youguang

Pinyin sort order

The standard for alphabetically sorting Hanyu Pinyin is given in the ABC dictionary series edited by John DeFrancis and issued by the University of Hawaii Press.

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 pīnyīn, 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:

  • shīshi
  • shīshī
  • shīshí
  • shīshǐ
  • shīshì
  • shíshī
  • shíshì
  • shǐshī
  • shìshī
  • Irrespective of tones, entries with the vowel u precede those with ü.
    For example:

    Entries without apostrophe precede those with apostrophe. For example:

    1. biànargue
    2. bǐ’ànthe other shore

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

    1. hòujìnaftereffect
    2. Hòu JìnLater 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 notā á ǎ à a,” but “a ā á ǎ à.” And, because lowercase comes before uppercase, notA a Ā ā Á á Ǎ ǎ À à” but “a A ā Ā á Á ǎ 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 / 漢語拼音詞彙 / 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 mǐngǎn 敏感.