What to do with the street signs? You decide!
September 30th, 2006 by MarkTone Marks on Roadsigns Part I- Mark’s opening argument.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part II- Prince Roy’s opening argument.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part III- Mark’s rebuttal.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part IV- Prince Roy’s rebuttal.
What should the road signs have on them?
- Mark was right, characters and pinyin with tones (42%)
- Prince Roy was right, characters and pinyin without tones (31%)
- Nothing but oracle bone script, you wusses (12%)
- Only characters, foreigners who can’t read them suck (10%)
- Whatever the guerrilla tone-markers deem fit (4%)
- Only pinyin, it’s about time the locals learn it (2%)
Total Votes: 52
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September 30th, 2006 at 9:46 am
interesting debate. I voted for tones even though I’m not in Taiwan and not ever likely to try to learn Chinese.
September 30th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
I’m on the fence about the whole thing. Tones would be nice, as PR says, in a perfect world, but tones are subjective, even apart from the different accents, tones are simply a rough guide to the complexities of Mandarin Chinese pronunciation, so I wonder if the time and effort would be worth it. For example, is the “fa” in “faguo (France) third or fourth tone? Do you go by popular usage or Beijing Standard or what?
September 30th, 2006 at 2:00 pm
Come on. There has to be something left for politicians to fight over.
September 30th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
I think Taiwan guóyǔ is perfectly appropriate for Taiwan, so fàguó it is. And btw, I correct myself, that should be Taiwan góyǐ.
September 30th, 2006 at 7:04 pm
[...] UPDATE: Mark has put up an interactive poll where you, the readers, can sound off about this all-important debate. Go here and vote! [...]
September 30th, 2006 at 11:37 pm
Wow, it’s neck and neck!
October 1st, 2006 at 5:30 am
Being that we’re not in Beijing, I’d say use the local tone usage. Isn’t the point of all this for non-natives to be able to communicate with locals about local road names?
Are there any streets named “Fàguó” in Taiwan? In the unlikely event that there are, I’d hope they would use the fourth tone. That’s how my dictionary (Far East Chinese-English Dictionary) shows it.
If you spelled “color” as “colour” back in school in Texas, wouldn’t your teacher have marked it wrong? If a student in London, England spelled it as “color,” they’d also get it wrong.
A student in Taiwan who used the third tone for the “Fà” of “Fàguó” would also have their answer marked wrong.
October 1st, 2006 at 9:39 am
It’s a tie in my view, though ultimately, I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually someday tones were added to signs. I’m an Arabic linguist myself, and I can tell you that romanization of Arabic words is also without tone or accent. There are similar problems when trying to pronouce the Arabic word from the roman letters. A certain roman spelling can be pronounced several ways depending on the word. There are a lot of sounds in Arabic that roman syllables just can’t represent. For instance, there are 2 ‘S’ sounds, 2 ‘T’ sounds, 2 ‘H’ sounds, 2 ‘D’ sounds, 2 ‘dh’ sounds, and several throaty sounds with no English equivalent. Would tone/accent markers make it easier to pronounce for non-natives? Not really, because the sounds are pretty unique and difficult to pronounce even if you know what they are supposed to sound like.
The school I learned Arabic at puts languages into catagories based on how difficult they are to learn for a non-native, and Arabic and Chinese were the top 2 most difficult non-English languages. The fact that romanization is difficult for both of them is no surpise to me. Although, Arabic doesn’t really need it since Arabic script is rather easy to read and is phonetic, whereas Chinese characters are unique for each word (for the most part).
October 2nd, 2006 at 8:17 pm
I had to vote for pinyin without tones, because I think that’d look funny and wouldn’t help.