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 at TPD, I had always thought Wade and Giles worked in tandem…now we know better. Great story and many thanks to Lisa for her post.
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Poster on right from the Great Leap Forward showing both pinyin and Chinese characters. Via Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Posters page.
8 responses so far ↓
1 ChinaLawBlog // Oct 3, 2006 at 3:37 pm
The Book, Oracle Bones, discusses how close Close China came to going to a Roman script. Makes for a fascinating read.
2 Stephanie // Oct 3, 2006 at 4:23 pm
You are entirely right about the crowds. While at first it was a romantic thought (”wow so many people together in such a small space could make a huge impact on the world!”), I changed my mind as soon as I went in an underground cafeteria. I am sure you know what I mean.
BTW: I bought a big bottle of beer at said cafeteria and people were giving me strange looks. Could this be because I was the only westerner, or because girls don’t drink beer??
Stephanie
3 花崗齋之愚公 // Oct 3, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Anything is possible, but yes staring at laowai is kind of a recreational activity for many Chinese. That said, it’s not terribly common (but not unheard of) for a woman to be drinking beer by herself.
Thanks for stopping by, I enjoyed reading your blog.
4 wu ming // Oct 3, 2006 at 5:26 pm
michael turton at the view from taiwan has a good post on the ongoing romanization wars over on the other side of the straits. it isn’t unusual to see a street romanized three different ways in as many blocks in taipei. madness.
-s
5 花崗齋之愚公 // Oct 3, 2006 at 7:21 pm
@Sean,
Yeah, I should have put a link to Michael’s post as well. He’s also been commenting on the TPD thread. I can definitely see where this would be an issue on Taiwan.
6 The Humanaught // Oct 3, 2006 at 7:32 pm
@J: It’s interesting that the poster contains pinyin, sans tonal marks. Out of curiosity did your profs write the tones both when romanizing to pinyin and romanizing to wade-giles?
7 花崗齋之愚公 // Oct 3, 2006 at 7:42 pm
Ryan,
I have seen posters from this era with the tonal marks. As for class, we almost never use the tonal marks. The Chinese names are confusing enough for most Anglophone students hearing them for the first time, adding tones would cause their heads to explode. We (usually) use the tones when speaking, but we don’t write them down.
That said, I have enough students from a Chinese cultural background that I have thrown the characters or translation for a certain concept or name (like 郑成功 for Koxinga)up on the board when the English name may not be immediately familiar to Chinese speakers.
Sean, you have any thoughts on this?
8 wu ming // Oct 4, 2006 at 12:53 pm
i’ve never seen any prof write the tones down w/ the pinyin, despite the fact that it would be helpful to do so, not in a history class at least. maybe they’re afraid of it looking too vietnamese? < shrugs >
then again, i’m surprised at how stubborn the accursed wade-giles and british postal system spellings are for placenames. hasn’t the time come to go iconoclast and stamp out the spelling of “canton,” “nanking” and “peking” once and for all?
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