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Taiwan 2002 |
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A Comparison of Various Chinese Romanization Systems |
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The Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (MPS) are used in ROC schools to teach children how to read Chinese (see Language). Accordingly, MPS is the most widely known and used system in Taiwan for learning Mandarin °ê»y pronunciations. It is, however, much less well known in the West. Wade-Giles is the Romanization system generally employed in the ROC today and has traditionally been the most frequently used system in Western scholarship. A drawback of this system is the use of apostrophes (') to indicate aspirated consonant sounds. Thus what English speakers hear as a d- is written t-, and what they know as t- is written t'. The original idea was to indicate that Mandarin has no voiced/unvoiced consonant distinctions (like the English d/t contrast), but rather differentiates between aspirated and unaspirated consonant initials. While linguistically sound as a transcription system for the Mandarin language of its era, it is confusing for speakers of English. To make things worse, the apostrophes are often left out of some publications due to aesthetic or other concerns, leaving no way to distinguish aspirated from unaspirated consonant sounds. Another problem is that, while tones can be indicated in the Wade-Giles system with numeral superscripts (e.g. jen2), they are usually omitted out of convenience. The umlaut in the front rounded vowel sound (u) also tends to be left out due to difficulties in typesetting. With these omissions, it becomes impossible to know the exact pronunciation of any given word without checking the original Chinese. These disadvantages aside, the system does give a general idea of how to pronounce a word. The Yale system is a relatively consistent and efficient one that is fairly easy for native speakers of American English to master. Its use, however, has never spread beyond a small number of Chinese language teaching texts. The Hanyu Pinyin system is the one adopted by the Chinese communists in mainland China, and by the Western news media. It corresponds closely to the MPS system. Its main potential drawback is its use of "leftover" letters like c, q, and x to represent Mandarin sounds that lack a handy equivalent in the Latin alphabet. These letters often confound those uninitiated in the Pinyin system, news broadcasters in particular. The Yale and Pinyin systems both add marks over the main vowel of a syllable to indicate tone. But again, the marks are often omitted as an expedient. The Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR) system was the ROC's official (since 1932) system of Romanizing Chinese, but was little known and seldom used. It had the unique feature of incorporating the tone of a word into its Romanized spelling, which was admittedly a convenience in typesetting. The rules for "spelling" the tones, however, were highly complicated; they varied according to the phonetic composition of the syllable in question. The difficulties in popularizing this system were obvious. In order to find a solution to such problems, the Ministry of Education concluded in January 1984 that the Gwoyeu Romatzyh should be revised and a working committee established to study and compare all existing transcription systems for Mandarin. The committee agreed on a revised system called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II) and, in May 1984, the MOE announced that this system would be put on trial use for one year. The final version of MPS II was announced on January 28, 1986. In April 1997, the Taipei City Government adopted Taiwan Pinyin (also known as Tongyong Pinyin) as the official Romanization system for street and place names in the Taipei area. The reasons behind the decision were that the new system can be used to Romanize not only Mandarin but also local languages in Taiwan, such as Southern Fujianese and Hakka, and that it is compatible with Hanyu Pinyin. In February 1999, the Executive Yuan placed the MOE in charge of standardizing the Romanization system used in the ROC. In July that year, the Executive Yuan Commission on Educational Reform decided, after hearing the MOE's report, that Hanyu Pinyin would be adopted as the standard Romanization system for Mandarin and a different system developed for Southern Fujianese and Hakka. Then, in November 2000, the MOE proposed to the Executive Yuan that Hanyu Pinyin be adopted and slight revisions made later on. A final decision had yet to be made as of December 2000. The following comparison table of Romanization systems is intended to clear up some of the confusion caused by the simultaneous use of the different systems. It is also a convenient reference when reading Chinese with the aid of the Mandarin Phonetic Symbols. A hyphen after a symbol or symbols (e.g. p-) means it is used as an initial; a hyphen before a symbol or symbols (e.g. -ung) signals a syllabic final. For the MPS symbols £´ and £¶, the vowel e is given in parentheses. This is to be transcribed into the other systems only when no other vowel is indicated in the MPS spelling. Multiple spellings for certain sounds in the Wade-Giles system indicate equally correct alternatives unless otherwise noted. Ultimately, none of the systems has proven better than the others; each has its strengths and shortcomings. Romanization system preferences seem to be strongly tied to which system one learns first and is most accustomed to.
* Used after l- and n-
The tone marks for the MPS system are: first tone, no mark; second tone, £½; third tone, £¾; fourth tone, £¿; and neutral tone, £». The Yale, Hanyu Pinyin, MPS II, and Tongyong Pinyin systems use the same tone marks, but add a first tone mark, -. The latter three do not have a mark for the neutral tone.
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