Over at TPD, guest host Lisa has a great post from Salon (Andrew Leonard, “Choosing Giles over Wade” 9/29/06) on the tangled history of the Wade-Giles system for romanizing Chinese. For those unfamiliar, it’s the difference between “Mao Tse-tung” and “Mao Zedong” or “Teng Hsiao-p’ing” and “Deng Xiaoping.” Attempts to find roman letter equivalents of Chinese sounds has a long history, and not just for westerners. Some early May Fourth reformers advocated ditching Chinese characters in favor of Roman letters to improve literacy. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a brief revival of the movement and on posters from that period (see right), you can see pinyin written underneath the Chinese characters. While pinyin never did replace Chinese characters, in the last 20 years it has emerged as the dominant form of romanization except, of course, in Taiwan.
In our UC classes, we almost always use pinyin if only because it has become the standard romanization for the major journals and university presses as well as the standard in most English-language journalism about China. We have a few profs who still put both spellings on the board, but the textbooks all use pinyin.
Like most people who commented over