Category Archives: romanization

PRC gov’t project has primary name in English, not Mandarin

Posted on by
Reply

This one had me confused at first. When I saw the photo I was expecting this to be another story about a typo. Here, after all, is a sign with 泰达 on both sides, which is “Taida,” not “Teda,” in Pinyin. And I’ve grown so used to seeing Pinyin described as “English” that at first at didn’t realize what was meant. But there’s something else going on here, something much more interesting:
street sign with TEDA AVENUE on one side and TAIDA AVENUE on the other; but the Hanzi are the same on both sides

泰达大街两侧的路牌上，“泰达”的英文标识出现了“TEDA”和“TAIDA”两种写法，前者是“泰达”的英文拼法，后者则是“泰达”二字的汉语拼音。从开发区地名办了解到，泰达大街正式的英文写法为“TEDAAVENUE”，而“TAIDA”的写法是不正确的。

But this still isn’t very clear. I did some digging and found that the street name refers to the nearby Tianjin Economic-technological Development Area (TEDA), the Mandarin name for which is Tiānjīn Jīngjì Jìshù Kāifāqū (天津经济技术开发区).

In other words, this street really does have a name originating in English: TEDA. The Chinese characters for the street name, 泰达 (Tàidá), are secondary. They have nothing to do with the Mandarin name of the park; rather, they are an awkward transliteration of TEDA, the acronym of the English name.

This practice extends beyond the name of the street into references to the name of the industrial park itself. “泰达” is all over the park’s official Web site, which, significantly, is at www.TEDA.gov.cn. Thus, English trumped Mandarin in naming a PRC-government-sponsored industrial park in a Mandarin-speaking region of China, despite PRC regulations against just this sort of situation.

So the original story in Hanzi becomes a little clearer if put into Pinyin:

TEDA Dàjiē liǎngcè de lùpái shàng, “Tàidá” de Yīngwén biāozhì chūxiàn le “TEDA” hé “Taida” liǎng zhǒng xiěfǎ, qiánzhě shì “泰达” de Yīngwén pīnfǎ, hòuzhě zéshì “Tàidá” èr zì de Hànyǔ Pīnyīn. Cóng kāifāqū dìmíng bàn liǎojiě dào, TEDA Dàjiē zhèngshì de Yīngwén xiěfǎ wéi “TEDA Avenue”, ér “TAIDA” de xiěfǎ shì bu zhèngquè de.

This, by the way, is also an example of how capitalizing everything on street signs can sometimes lead to confusion.

resources:

Korean romanization — again

Posted on by
14

It’s not just Taiwan that can’t seem to get its romanization situation resolved well. “Calls for a revision of the current Romanization system for the Korean alphabet, Hangul, are gaining more ground as confusion continues on the roads, signboards and government documents after the introduction of the current form in July 2000,” reports the Korea Times.

Some 75 percent of South Koreans think the government-enacted Romanization system does not reflect the original pronunciation of Hangul properly, a survey conducted by the Yoido Institute, a think tank of the opposition Grand National Party (GNP) showed yesterday.

Of the 2,150 adults polled last week, 66.1 percent wanted the current system to be revised despite the expected financial cost, according to the survey conducted on the occasion of the 560th Hangul Day which falls on Oct. 9.

I make no claims of knowledge of which romanization system would be best for Korea, so be sure to read my comments with that in mind. But I do know to be wary of polls conducted by political parties.

Hangul was first Romanized using the McCune-Reischauer (M-R) system in the early 20th century, when a number of foreign missionaries came to the Choson Kingdom. But the country’s Romanization system underwent flip-flopping policies in the following decades.

“Confusions we experience today have been caused largely due to the arbitrary attitudes of armchair linguists and some misguided government officials,’’ said Kim Bok-moon, professor emeritus of Chungbuk National University.

Scraping the traditional M-R system, which had prevailed in the past decades, the government adopted a new system on July 7, 2000, shifting “Pusan,’’ “Kobukson (turtle ship) and “kimchi’’ into “Busan,’’ “Geobukseon’’ and “gimchi.’’

The English-language media, including the state-funded Yonhap News Agency, had resisted the change for a period of time. But, as time went by, all the news media gave in to the new system except The Korea Times, which has maintained the M-R system concluding that it is the most similar to actual pronunciation.

Let alone the tremendous cost of the revision, the main problem of the current system is that it does not ensure the exact pronunciation of the original sound of various Korean words.

No romanization system — or any other script, for that matter — ensures the exact pronunciation of the words of a language for people who do not know how that system works. It seems unlikely that the South Korean government would have promulgated an inherently unworkable system, such as the bastardized version of Wade-Giles is for Mandarin Chinese. (Proper Wade-Giles, of course, could work perfectly well for Mandarin, though I certainly don’t recommend it.)

And the author shouldn’t have written “the exact pronunciation of the original sound of various Korean words” but simply “the exact pronunciation of Korean words.”

Kim, who serves as president of the Research Institute for Korean Romanization (KOROMA), has made sole efforts to end the confusion, submitting a petition to then President Kim Dae-jung and presenting a Constitutional petition.

In a seminar at the National Assembly yesterday, he presented the disastrous result of an experiment that he conducted along with KBS TV about the new system in Itaewon, downtown Seoul, and at the Kimpo International Airport.

When he asked foreign people to read “Yeoksam-dong (???)’’ and “Geobukseon (???),’’ the majority of them pronounced them “ioksaemdong (????)’’ and “jiobuksion (?????),’’ far different from the actual sound.

Oh, no. Not another “let’s ask a random and probably clueless foreigner how to pronounce something” poll. These mean nothing. There are plenty of people in the United States who would mangle even the pronunciations of items on a menu in a Mexican restaurant; but that doesn’t mean Spanish orthography needs revision.

Because a committee under Taiwan’s Ministry of Education approved a romanization method for Taiwanese last week, some grandstanding member of the legislature is almost certainly going to force some executive-branch official who doesn’t know the system to read out loud something that was written in it, thus “proving” the system doesn’t work. It might already have happened.

According to Kim, 16 out of the newly Romanized 21 vowels of Hangul are out of sync with actual sounds when they are read by English-speaking people, who have no knowledge about the premise that “eo’’ would be pronounced as “?.’’ He has devised his own system, which he claims ensures the best pronunciations.

“Disasters that many critics expected have already begun. We can easily find serious confusion here and there,’’ Kim told The Korea Times. “We have to correct the mistake without delay before it is too late, and adopt a proper system.’’

Romanization systems seldom work well when forced into the mold of an anglicization. I wonder if romanized Korean is commonly but mistakenly referred to in Korea as “English.”

And, of course, there’s always an appeal to nationalism:

One example of what Kim cited as “losses of national interests’’ was “Koguryo’’ and “Dokdo,’’ which became objects of historical and even territorial rows with China and Japan during the past couple of years.

At a time when China spelled the ancient Korean kingdom as “Koguryo,’’ South Korea’s English-language dailies, except for The Korea Times, wrote it as “Goguryeo.’’ It was later unified into Koguryo as even the UNESCO’s World Heritage called it Koguryo.

A set of South Korean tiny islets in the East Sea, Dokdo had also been divided into “Tokto’’ and “Dokdo.’’ The Korea Times agreed to unify it into Dokdo at the recommendation of the government as an exceptional case. But the foreign news media and Web sites are still left confused between them.

The article closes:

Critics say the Romanization system should be revised in a way that best reflects the characteristics of the Korean language and the reunification of the two Koreas should also be taken into consideration.

North Korea has a system similar to the M-R system, which writes its cities and places in English as “Pyongyang,’’ “Kaesong’’ and “Mt. Kumgang’’ _ not “Pyeongyang,’’ “Gaeseong’’ and “Mt. Gumgang.’’

North Korea once proposed the unification of the different Romanization systems used by South and North Korea in a meeting of linguists from the two Koreas in Berlin, Germany, in 2002.

++++++

source: Hangul Romanization Revision Proposed, Korea Times, September 26, 2006

some comments here: More romanization debate, The Marmot’s Hole, September 29, 2006

read about hangul here: Hangul Day, Language Log, October 9, 2005

MOE approves Taiwanese romanization; Tongyongists protest

Posted on by
20

Years of valuable time has been lost in the squabbling over romanization systems for Taiwanese. And that squabbling will no doubt continue, as the links below make clear. But an important step was taken on Thursday. Finally, finally, Taiwan’s Ministry of Education has approved a romanization system for Taiwanese: Tái-luó-bǎn Pīnyīn (台羅版拼音), to give its Mandarin name.

I’m already on the record as having called Tongyong Pinyin, in its various incarnations, a national embarrassment for Taiwan, so I won’t bother to disguise the fact that I got a real kick out of the fact that the Tongyong Pinyin scheme for the Taiwanese language was roundly rejected. I know that more than a few readers of Pinyin News will be cheering this news. For many, this has as much or more to do with the methods used to push through the much-despised Tongyong Pinyin system for Mandarin than any defects, real or imagined, in the Tongyong Pinyin system for Taiwanese.

Predictably, Yu Bo-quan (余伯泉, I’ve given up bothering to figure out which of the various spellings for his name he’s using now), the main person behind the Tongyong romanization systems, is unhappy. Reportedly, after it was clear things were not going his way he stormed out of the meeting. After he left the new system was approved unanimously.

Yu’s remarks make clear the political nature of his approach.

Tái-luó-bǎn pīnyīn xìtǒng zuó chuǎngguān chénggōng hòu, Yú Bó-quán qìfèn de shuō, Tái-luó xìtǒng de qǐyuán shì Táiwān Mǐnnányǔ yīnbiāo xìtǒng (TLPA), shì Guómíndǎng shídài de chǎnwù, ér 2002 Tōngyòng Pīnyīn shì Mínjìndǎng zhízhèng nèi tōngguò de, zhìyí wèihé Jiàoyùbù wúfǎ hànwèi zhízhèngdǎng de Mǐnnányǔ pīnyīn xìtǒng zhǔzhāng, Jiàoyùbù duànrán tōngguò Tái-luó-bǎn, Táiwānyǔ Tōngyòng Liánméng hòuxù jiāng zhǔnbèi kàngzhēng. (台羅版拼音系統昨闖關成功後，余伯泉氣憤地說，台羅系統的起源是台灣閩南語音標系統（ＴＬＰＡ），是國民黨時代的產物，而二○○二通用拼音是民進黨執政內通過的，質疑為何教育部無法捍衛執政黨的閩南語拼音系統主張，教育部斷然通過台羅版，台灣語通用聯盟後續將準備抗爭。)

That doesn’t sound all that far from calling those on the committee dupes of the KMT, which isn’t likely to win him any friends with those in power. But it may well be that by this point he has so alienated others he thinks he has nothing to lose.

Apparently Tongyong for Taiwanese will retain something of a foothold in southern Taiwan. (See source no. 8 below.)

Later, I’ll try to put up more about just what system was approved and under what circumstances it will (and will not) be used — unless the ever-knowledgeable a-giâu beats me to it.

Because there’s a lot of confusion about Tongyong, a few notes are in order:

  • Tongyong is not one romanization system for all the languages of Taiwan but rather a group of related systems, some of which could be said to work better (or worse) than others.
  • When Tongyong (for Mandarin) was officially approved in Taiwan in 2002, the Tongyong system for Hakka also received approval but not the Tongyong Pinyin system for Taiwanese.
  • As the vote should make clear, plenty of strong supporters of romanization (and other scripts) for Taiwanese have never much cared for Tongyong.

sources:

  1. Tái-luó-bǎn pīnyīn míngnián shànglù; Jiàoyùbù duànrán dìng’àn; Tōngyòng liánméng jiāng kàngzhēng (台羅版拼音明年上路 教育部斷然定案 通用聯盟將抗爭), Píngguǒ Rìbào (Apple Daily), September 29, 2006
  2. Guóxiǎo lǎoshī: xiāngtǔ yǔyán zuìhǎo zìrán xuéxí (國小老師：鄉土語言最好自然學習), Liánhé Xīnwén Wǎng, September 29, 2006
  3. Zuóyè zuìxīn: Mǐnnányǔ xiāngtǔ jiàoxué quèdìng cǎi Táiwān Mǐnnányǔ Luómǎzì pīnyīn (昨夜最新：閩南語鄉土教學確定採台灣閩南語羅馬字拼音), CNA, September 29, 2006
  4. Táiyǔ Tōngyòng liánméng kàngyì Jiàoyùbù cǎi Mǐnnányǔ Luómǎ pīnyīn (台語通用聯盟抗議教育部採閩南語羅馬拼音), CNA, September 29, 2006
  5. Mǐnnányǔ xiāngtǔ jiàoxué quèdìng cǎi Táiwān Mǐnnányǔ Luómǎzì pīnyīn (閩南語鄉土教學確定採台灣閩南語羅馬字拼音), CNA, September 29, 2006
  6. Mǐnnányǔ pīnyīnfǎ quèlì: Luómǎ pīnyīn shèng chū (閩南語拼音法確立：羅馬拼音勝出), Zhōngguǎng Xīnwén Wǎng, September 29, 2006
  7. Pāibǎn dìng’àn! Jiàoyùbù tōngguò Mǐnnányǔ jiàoxué; cǎiyòng Tái-luó pīnyīn (拍板定案！教育部通過閩南語教學　採用台羅拼音), Dōngsēn Xīnwénbào, September 29, 2006
  8. Nánbù sì xiàn-shì dǐzhì; Tái-luó pīnyīn jīn chuǎngguān (南部四縣市抵制 台羅拼音今闖關), Zhōngshí Diànzǐ Bào, September 29, 2006

Taipei street names

Posted on by
5

I’ve finally put online here on this site my list of Taipei street names in Chinese characters and Hanyu Pinyin. The list includes versions both with and without tone marks, as well as in pure Hanyu Pinyin and the mix of Pinyin and English that is generally found here in Taiwan.

I’d like to say some more about this, but I just don’t have the time now.

tone marks on signage: a debate

Posted on by
1

Check out the “dueling laowai” debate over whether to use tone marks on street signs in Taiwan. This is a series of pieces written by Mark of Doubting to Shuo and Prince Roy of Prince Roy’s Realm. Unfortunately, some of the comments have gone off into the land of myths and shadows, and I just don’t have the time or the energy to deal with all of that now. But the basics of the tone-mark debate are well worth reading.

Ministry of Education and romanization for Taiwanese … again

Posted on by
Reply

The matter of Taiwanese, script, and pedagogy is in the news again. But it’s still hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. And the government has been so slow to get much done in this area that even complete agreement about what to do wouldn’t convince me that anything substantial is going to happen soon.

So I’ll just refer those interested in the topic to the stories and hope people can provide some clarity in the comments here.

early British article on Chinese characters

Posted on by
4

Matt at No-sword tells of the welcome news that many back issues of the journals of the Royal Society are now online. What makes this particularly interesting is that the Royal Society has been publishing these since at least 1665.

So I dug around and found “Some Observations, and Conjectures concerning the Chinese Characters,” which dates from the late 1600s. It was published in an issue of Philosophical Transactions that contains not one but two articles by Edmond Halley. Wow.

The article on Chinese characters, however, is in many places opaque — not that that’s really a big surprise considering this was written more than 300 years ago. The author is intrigued by the notion of a universal artificial language. He concludes, “Now as by such a Language the Character might be made Effable without Musical Tones or Difficult Aspirations, so had we Dictionarys of the Signification of the Characters, we might as soon learn the Chinese Character, as we can Latine, or any other Language to be learnt by Book, and not by Speaking.”

This appears to be an early example of several myths about Chinese characters, such as the ideographic myth, which was first debunked in the West about 150 years later by Peter DuPonceau.

The author also tells of what he believes is the “true design” of the Yi Ching (Yìj?ng ??):

both the Chinese and European Commentators assert it to be a Conjuring Book, or a Book to tell Fortunes by, and to be made use of by the Chinese for that purpose; whereas by the small Specimen I have seen of it, I conceive it to contain the whole Ground, Rule or Grammer, of their Character, Language and Philosophy, and that by the understanding of it, the Foundation and Rule of their Language and Character, may be without much difficulty Deciphered and Understood.

I don’t think that particular line of thought got very far.

The article concludes with an illustration that mainly features numbers in Chinese characters. What makes this particularly interesting, at least for me, is the addition of romanization. I have rotated the image counter-clockwise to make it easier to read the romanization. Note especially the use of the letter x. (Click the image to see it slightly enlarged.)

click for slightly larger image, mostly of numbers in Chinese characters and romanization

sources and further readings:

Chinglish International Airport?

Posted on by
23

In what many view as a long-overdue move, Taiwan’s government has removed the name of Chiang Kai-shek, the island’s one-time dictator, from the title of the country’s main international airport. What has been reported as the new English name, however, is a bit strained in that the country’s name precedes the county/city name.

  English Pinyin Hanzi
old Chiang Kai-shek International Airport Zhōngzhèng Guójì
Jīchǎng		 中正國際機場
new Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport Táiwān Táoyuán Guójì
Jīchǎng		 台灣桃園國際機場

In Mandarin, there’s nothing tremendously odd about using “Taiwan Taoyuan.” In English, however, it’s a completely different story.

exact phrase romanization no. of results in Google
Taoyuan Taiwan   241,000
Taiwan Taoyuan   42,400
 
臺灣桃園 Taiwan Taoyuan 43,200
台灣桃園 Taiwan Taoyuan 220,000
total for 臺灣桃園
and 台灣桃園		 263,200
 
桃園臺灣 Taoyuan Taiwan 5,720
桃園台灣 Taoyuan Taiwan 461
total
for 桃園臺灣 and 桃園台灣		 6,181

Almost all of the examples in English of “Taiwan Taoyuan” have punctuation (stronger than a comma, that is) or new lines separating the words, so running the two names together in that order is less common than the Google result implies, as most English speakers know intuitively.

“Taiwan Taoyuan,” when used in English, reminds me of nothing so much as the annoying term “Chinese Taipei” (Zhonghua Taibei / 中華台北). This name represents the international kissing of Beijing’s ass diplomatic solution worked out so Taiwan’s teams can participate in international sporting events without China throwing too much of a hissyfit. (We we still get some of those anyway, of course.)

Since using anything along the lines of “Chinese Taipei” would be anathema to the present administration in Taiwan, what’s going on with the new name for the airport? The logical name would probably be simply “Taoyuan International Airport,” the airport being in Taoyuan County rather than Taipei County. But outside of Taiwan, who has ever heard of Taoyuan? (That’s probably just as well for Taiwan, because much of Taoyuan is downright ugly.) And, anyway, I think that those deciding on the new name regarded adding “Taiwan” and taking out “Chiang Kai-shek” as the top priorities.

Of course, it could be worse. Some in the KMT have called for the name to be changed to “Taiwan Taoyuan Chiang Kai-shek International Airport.” Ugh.

However, the code letters for the airport, TPE and RCTP, will not be changed. These are both rooted in the Wade-Giles romanization system, under which we have Taipei (properly T’ai-pei) rather than Taibei.

Fortunately for all concerned, both “Taoyuan” and “Taiwan” are examples of names spelled the same in most romanization systems. So, at least in this case, the current administration’s attachment to the Tongyong Pinyin romanization system won’t lead to further international embarrassment.

I spoke earlier today with someone at the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, who informed me that although the Mandarin name of the airport was now officially Táiwān Táoyuán Guójì Jīchǎng, the English name has yet to be set by the Ministry of Education. So it’s possible the English name could change.

Anyone want to play Name That Airport? I’m more than half serious. The authorities here no doubt need some help with this. (Even though Taoyuan is one of the ugliest places in Taiwan, let’s keep this nice.)

Oh, in case anyone’s puzzled that “Chiang Kai-shek” and “Zhōngzhèng” don’t look much like each other or even have the same number of syllables, the reason is that Zhōngzhèng is a sort of assumed name, not the name by which he was known to his family, which in Mandarin is Ji?ng Jièshí (???). For more on this see the names section of the Wikipedia article on Chiang Kai-shek. (Me linking to a Wikipedia article? There’s a first time for everything, I guess.)

sources: