Old Taiwan-hand Pinyin
April 4th, 2006 by MarkEverybody knows how confused Taiwan is when it comes to pinyin, that’s no news. Likewise, it’s not surprising that few of the foreigners who came here without prior study have a firm grasp on any method of romanization, let alone a standard one. But one thing I’ve been noticing more and more is that all the “old Taiwan-hand” foreigners here seem to use the same funky romanizations. Two different bosses of mine wrote 罰寫 (which is fáxiĕ in pinyin) as “fasye”. Numerous old timers have written 中山 (which is zhōngshān in pinyin) as “chungshan”. One time, I read one of Michael’s posts about a restaurant he visited in Yŏnghé, very close to where I used to live. Despite the fact that I used to live within walking distance of the place, I didn’t realize where he was talking about until I asked him what some of his old Taiwan-hand pinyin meant. Similarly, I was once confused by a Leakypen posting which criticized the romanization used in a document and then went on to romanize 政治 (zhèngzhì) as “chengchi”. I pointed that out, and he defended the romanization as the “correct local romanization”. Knowing he’d been around a long time, I asked him how the system works. He didn’t get back to me, so I’m asking all the “old Taiwan-hands” out there!
If the correct way to romanize ㄓㄥ is “cheng”, ㄓ is “chi”, and ㄓㄚ is “cha”, then how are ㄔㄥ, ㄔ, and ㄔㄚ romanized in Taiwan? Also, are retroflexive r’s romanized at all? I.e., is a distinction kept between 俄 (ㄜ) and 二 (ㄦ) in Taiwanese romanization?
Obviously, I’m going to keep using the standard pinyin romanization system, and I’m not going to change the way my pinyin tone tool works to match some weird Taiwanese convention. I would love to learn what the convention is, though. I’ve read a bit about the history of romanization here and just assumed it was random, but there are way too many old-timers coming up with the same romanizations. There must be more to it than that. Anybody care to enlighten me?
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April 4th, 2006 at 9:12 am
When I was in college I took two useless semesters of Chinese taught by an elderly Taiwanese librarian (the semester after I graduated they hired a proper instructor from BLCU) and the book we used, published in 1968, used Yale Romanization, which if I recall correctly looks a lot like what you’re describing.
I had learned Pinyin earlier and continued to use that in my own notes, but for tests and stuff I had to learn the Yale system. One thing I can say is that for a standard American accent it did a lot better job of describing the sounds than does Pinyin (though I still think once you learn Pinyin it’s cake).
April 4th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Mark-san,
Learning one pinyin system is enough for people in China. I feel very happy about that particularly after hearing you unfortunately have several systems in Taiwan.
Even the Hanyu Pinyin spelling made me confused first since its pronunciation rules are a little different from those of Roman letters I learned at school in Japan.
I do not know about Old Taiwan-hand Pinyin, but I imagine that it might be a mixture of a few romanizations such as Wade and Yale systems. Just a shot in the dark.
April 5th, 2006 at 7:49 am
You have never heard of Chabuduo Pinyin?! The good thing is that almost anybody can use it. If you don’t know the correct pinyin just write down something vaguely correct. It is a brilliant system in that respect
April 5th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
That’s what I kept thinking, but I keep seeing so many people write down identical non-pinyin romanizations. It’s got to have something with the way streets used to be named or something.
April 5th, 2006 at 11:29 pm
Mark, if you really are looking for an answer, the man who I know would know is Professor Reynolds at National Chi Nan University. He is expert on Chinese literature and an old hand in Taiwan. http://www.flld.ncnu.edu.tw/flld2004/teacher.asp?no=5
April 6th, 2006 at 9:17 am
When I arrived, the “chung”’s you’re describing killed me. “Taiwan Fun”’s website used it to give directions, while the streetsigns in Taichung/Taizhong had switched to zh’s. I kept wondering if there were more sounds in Chinese that I hadn’t been told about before…
April 6th, 2006 at 3:47 pm
Mark-san,
I have gotten some information on the romanizations in Taiwan. It might be confusing even for the Taiwanese to use several systems, and all the more so for foreigners. In this sense, I feel very comfortable living in China.
1. The “国語羅馬字”was published in 1923 in China. It was kind of an improved Wade system and did not become popular due to the introduction of the “中国拉丁化新文字”in 1929. In China, the Hanyu Pinyin came into wider use later.
2. But the “国語羅馬字” is still being used by some linguists in Taiwan. In this system, for example, “朱” is romanized as “chu” and “謝” as “Shieh.” And tones are represented by using alphabets, not by tone marks.
3. In 1986, the Taiwan government published the “simplified 国語羅馬字,” and it has been used for some street signs in the areas except in Taibei since 1998. This system uses the same tone marks as the Hanyu Pinyin in China.
April 7th, 2006 at 12:32 am
Hi,
Yes, the old timers (I first came here 11 years ago, so I guess that makes me old-timer now) are consistently using ‘wierd’ romanizations cos they are using the system orignally used here, which is basically a poorly implemented version of the Wade-Giles system. IIRC it is one of the reasons that Taipei is not spelled Taibei, cos WG has things like Tai p’ei
where p’ is actually a b but no-one ever knows or cares, and the apostrophe gets dropped, so Taipei. Same reason for Peking p’ = b, k’ = j.
You will also see this system used by older people for romanizing their names, hence Chang ch= ‘zh’ etc.
Since it was used extensively, many of us still use it when writing local locations in “English”.
April 9th, 2006 at 5:12 pm
The situation is basically as John M. described. Signs in Taipei, where most foreigners lived and worked, used to be in bastardized Wade-Giles (e.g., Chungshan, Tunhua), with a bit of the old Chinese Postal System (e.g., Nanking, Keelung) tossed in. (Ding, dong, the witch is dead!) Outside Taipei, most signs have been — and, for the most part, remain — in MPS2.
Note, though, that “Peking” is Postal System, not Wade-Giles, in which it would be Pei-ching.
April 10th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
Mark S., thank you! I read through that page on your site, and found explanations for most of the wierd “old-Taiwan hand” romanizations that I’ve seen. I was already familiar with the whole bastardized Wade-Giles phemonimon and written about it before, but MPS2 was the missing piece of the puzzle. It explains nearly all of the non-Wade-Guiles, non-pinyin, romanizations I’ve seen.
BTW, do you know how the postal system’s crazier romanizations, i.e. Jilong->Keelung, came about?
April 13th, 2006 at 10:09 am
I’m glad those pages were of use.
The Postal System isn’t really a system. It’s probably better thought of as the practice of using romanized forms that had become traditional by the late 19th century. Often, these had nothing to do with Mandarin (e.g., Canton for what is now labeled Guangzhou); in this one particular aspect the Postal System has a distinct advantage: the spellings of place names were generally assigned on the basis of the language of the people living in that place instead of the present Mandarin uber alles approach.
I don’t know anything about the etymology of Jilong/Keelung. But I suspect it is like so many other place names, where the name comes from the name given to the place by the original inhabitants (a certain tribe aborigines, in this case). The proper pronunciation probably got mangled some whenever whoever it was from outside (certainly not a trained linguist!) wrote down the name. Then Chinese characters — often with a dash or two of auspiciousness added — could be assigned based on the pronunciation of the person who gets the job of officially recording the name. Then, finally, people start believing that the Chinese characters represent the real etymology, and so we end up with nonsense like “terraced bay” being the “real” meaning of Taiwan. And so we end up with “the common fallacy of wàngwénshēngyì 望文生義, whereby the semantic qualities of Chinese characters interfere with the real meanings of the terms that they are being used to transcribe phonetically.” (See Victor Mair’s How to Forget Your Mother Tongue and Remember Your National Language.)
May 9th, 2006 at 5:42 am
Interesting thread here. I first went to Taiwan in 1981 and I’ve learned at least four different romanizations (WG, pinyin, Yale, 國語羅馬字) plus bopomofo. None of the teachers I ever had in Taiwan could really do any romanization system well (although all could do bopomofo perfectly) so it is no surprise that public officials and other random non-linguists mess up spellings on signs and other places.
A few random thoughts:
Keelung is a romanized version of that city’s name as pronounced in Taiwanese (the closest approximation in pinyin would be “Gailang”. I don’t know whether that name is itself a “Minnanized” version of a previous aboriginal name.
Peking is what the characters 北京 sounded like to a British postal worker when pronounced by a Cantonese speaker in Hong Kong or Guangdong sometime in the 18th century. If you get someone to say those characters in Taiwanese it also sounds a lot like “Peking”.
February 23rd, 2007 at 7:46 pm
please
can somebody help me
i have found these system of taiwanese romanization http://www.edutech.org.tw/AR-Letter/Taiwanese(1).htm
it’s differs from pinyin so much! i m really confused… can somebody easily read that? may be somebody knows the site the rules of pronunciation of all these are explained better?
hope to hear from you soon