{"id":1541,"date":"2008-10-16T21:17:31","date_gmt":"2008-10-16T13:17:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=1541"},"modified":"2015-12-16T18:03:43","modified_gmt":"2015-12-16T10:03:43","slug":"when-to-use-hyphens-in-hanyu-pinyin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2008\/when-to-use-hyphens-in-hanyu-pinyin\/","title":{"rendered":"When to use hyphens in Hanyu Pinyin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/readings\/pronun-and-orth.gif\" alt=\"cover of Chinese Romanization: Pronunciation and Orthography\" style=\"float: right; width: 138px; height: 200px;\" \/>I&#8217;ve just put online another excerpt from Yin Binyong&#8217;s book about Pinyin. This one covers <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/readings\/yin_binyong\/o11_4_hyphen.pdf\">use of the hyphen in Hanyu Pinyin<\/a> (400 KB PDF).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll summarize some of the basics. <\/p>\n<p>First, I want to stress that in Pinyin a hyphen should never be used to indicate syllable breaks. Those are easy to discern in Pinyin without any such Wade-Gilish clutter &#8212; or without any such foolishness as InTerCaPiTaLiZaTion. And in those few cases that might otherwise be problematic, the <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/romanization\/hanyu\/apostrophes.html\">apostrophe<\/a> works nicely. <\/p>\n<p>OK, so what are the <em>correct<\/em> uses of the hyphen in Pinyin? Often, it&#8217;s employed much like the en-dash in English, for ranges and connections. And it&#8217;s also used in many abbreviated forms, esp. in cases with proper nouns. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the road on Taiwan&#8217;s east coast between Sua&#8217;ao and Hualian: the Su-Hua Expressway<\/li>\n<li>the rail line between Beijing and Tianjin is the Jing-Jin line (&#20140;&#27941;&#22478;&#38469;&#38081;&#36335;)<\/li>\n<li>Beijing Daxue (Peking University) &#8211;> Bei-Da (not Beida)<\/li>\n<li>Gu&#243;l&#236; T&#225;iw&#257;n D&#224;xu&#233; (National Taiwan University) &#8211;> Tai-Da (not Taida)<\/li>\n<li>English-Chinese dictionary: Ying-Han cidian<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In terms of signage, that covers the most frequently encountered needs for the hyphen. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/news_photos\/2008\/10\/bannan_big.jpg\" alt=\"photo of signage in the Taipei MRT system, pointing toward the &#039;Bannan Line&#039;\" width=\"500\" height=\"284\"  \/><br \/>\n<strong>This sign in Taipei Main Station should read &#8220;Ban-Nan Line&#8221;, not &#8220;Bannan Line&#8221;, because the line runs between <em>Ban<\/em>qiao and <em>Nan<\/em>gang.<\/strong> (Actually, now it starts farther out, in Tucheng; but it hasn&#8217;t been redubbed the Tu-Nan line.)<\/p>\n<p>For most other uses, see the full document. (Or see the <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/readings\/texts\/hyphens.html\">older HTML version<\/a>, which is without Hanzi.) <\/p>\n<p>That section of the book, however, doesn&#8217;t mention one minor use of the hyphen in Hanyu Pinyin: hyphenated family names. These days, most women retain their original names when they marry. Formerly, however, a woman would often link her original name with her husband&#8217;s family name. Thus, if Ms. Guo Meihua were to marry a Mr. Li, she might choose to become Li-Guo Meihua, just as a Ms. Smith marrying a Mr. White might choose to adopt the name Smith-White (or White-Smith). <\/p>\n<p>Note, however, that hyphens are <em>not<\/em> used in what are originally two-syllable family names. The well-known historian is Sima Qian, not Si-Ma Qian. (Similarly, Ouyang, not Ou-Yang; Zhuge, not Zhu-Ge.) Such family names, however, are rare. <\/p>\n<p>For more on this, see p. 156 of the section on <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/readings\/yin_binyong\/o2_proper_nouns.pdf\">proper nouns in Pinyin<\/a> (1.9 MB PDF).<\/p>\n<p>(Wade-Gilish? Wade-Gileish? Wade-Gile-ish? Wade-Gile<em>ish<\/em>? I still can&#8217;t figure out how best to style my nonce term. Oh well.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just put online another excerpt from Yin Binyong&#8217;s book about Pinyin. This one covers use of the hyphen in Hanyu Pinyin (400 KB PDF). I&#8217;ll summarize some of the basics. First, I want to stress that in Pinyin a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2008\/when-to-use-hyphens-in-hanyu-pinyin\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,106,95,32,20,600,48,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chinese","category-hanyu","category-linguistics","category-mandarin","category-pinyin","category-pinyin-rules","category-signage","category-writing-systems"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1541"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7037,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1541\/revisions\/7037"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}