I’ve made a Firefox extension that converts pinyin with tone numbers into pinyin with tone marks. The specifics of the conversion process are identical to those of the online pinyin converter I wrote earlier.

After installing the extension, a blue square will appear on the right side of the status bar at the bottom of your Firefox web browser. To use the tool, type some pinyin with tone numbers into any plain text field on any web page. Then highlight the text and click on the blue 拼 on your status bar. It will convert the tone numbers into the appropriate marks over the appropriate vowels.

For example, if you type in “zhong1wen2″, highlight it and hit the button, then it will be converted into “zhōngwén”.

Thanks to John for feedback on the design, and to Wayne and Andrew for testing on Mac and Linux machines.

Go to the download page to get it.

Muninn has made my Pinyin Tone Tool into something more useful– an OS X dashboard widget!

I’m happy to announce the results of a few hours of tinkering: The Pinyin Tone Widget. This OS X dashboard widget will take a series of Chinese pinyin words with tone numbers appended at the end of each syllable and will add the tone marks where appropriate (e.g. zhong1guo2 becomes zhōngguó).

Get it while it’s hot.

For the first time in years, I’m absolutely floored by a new Chinese IME. Google just came out of nowhere, slapped their Google Pinyin up for download and humbled the competition. Like other IMEs, Google Pinyin uses a word’s context to figure out which character to input. It’s just a lot better at it. I really can’t get over how intelligent this IME is. It handles mis-ordered n’s and g’s or z’s and h’s, and it’s even pretty good about knowing when just output English.

Just as Microsoft has, Google has put far more work into input for mainland users than for those using traditional characters in Taiwan. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google Pinyin can be set to output traditional characters. Even though I’m much more used to using zhuyin input, I find Google Pinyin to be faster than Microsoft’s traditional Chinese IME, especially if I’m typing full paragraphs of text. It really saves a lot of time not having to switch out of the IME every time I want to type a punctuation mark.

Setting Google Pinyin to output traditional Chinese

Just click on the pair of cogs at the right hand side of the Google Pinyin toolbar, then select 属性没值, click the 词典 tab, click the 繁体模式 checkbox and then accept. You’ll then be typing in traditional characters!

Update: Holly, Fili, Mark S., and Brendan have all written about Google Pinyin, too.

I’ve recently added quicktags to Toshuo.com. Commenters here have always been able to use various HTML tags, such as <i>, <b>, <a>, and <blockquote>. For those commenters who run their own sites and are familiar with HTML, it’s been usable. Still, I want to make it a bit easier for people who aren’t so familiar with HTML to format their comments. That’s what quicktags are for.

quicktags Hosted on Zooomr

If you want part of your comment to be in italics, highlight the portion you want to italicize and then click on the blue box with the I in it. The tags will be added for you. Then, as soon as you type anything more into the box, the change will display in the instant preview below the commenting box. Use the B button to make text bold, the B-Quote button for block quotes, and the Link box to create a hyper-link to another web site. Users of web forums will probably already be familiar with these.

In addition to the standard quicktags, I’ve also added tags for the each vowel-tone combination. Some Chinese speaking readers have told me that they like my pinyin tool, but it’s a bit inconvenient to open another window, type a comment in there, and then convert it. Now, you can click on any of the vowel-tone buttons to add vowels with tone marks to the pinyin in your comments. Don’t highlight anything first; just click the button. One thing I should point out for any perfectionists out there, is that the rules for which vowel to add the tone mark to are a little bit complex. If you want to type a lot of pinyin in a comment, it would probably be best to use the Pinyin Tone Tool. For those who either know, or aren’t worried, where the tone marks go, this should make things a bit more convenient.

Several people have pointed me towards this piece, which is directed at Mark S. of Pinyin.info, and other Taiwan bloggers, including myself. In it, Tonyong Pinyin supporter, Mark Caltonhill (why oh why does he have to be named Mark, too?), tells foreign bloggers to “shut up and fit in”.

Later, our increasingly hypothetical tourist might be reading an introduction to Taiwan’s history with names spelt according to the Yale Romanization, popular among American academics until quite recently, and he is likely to be taken to his destination by a driver called Chang or Lin who may spell her name according to any idiosyncratic preference, most commonly based on the older Wade-Giles system.

Perhaps surprisingly, many foreigners who settle in Taiwan or stay for longer periods, rather than becoming acclimatized to this situation, often become increasingly irate. “Taiwan’s approach to this has been far more than ridiculous; it is patronizing of and offensive to foreigners,” said the Taiwan-based American creator of a Web site solely dedicated to the promotion of his favored form of romanization, hanyu pinyin.

His attitude is fairly typical of those expressed on the many foreigner-run forums and blogs in Taiwan, which have almost-unanimously adopted HP as their standard. The system was developed in Russia for that country’s far-eastern Chinese-speaking minority before being adopted by the People’s Republic of China and, more recently, by the United Nations. Nevertheless, just as the PRC has not ruled Taiwan for as much as a single day, similarly, neither has its HP ever been the official romanization system on the island.

source: When in Rome, shut up and fit in, Taiwan Journal, Vol. XXIII No. 38, September 29, 2006

I would suggest that the writer take a closer look at the problem.

Taiwanese people don’t need romanized street names. They can read characters. It’s their foreign spouses, short term foreign workers, foreign immigrants, foreign business people, and foreign students of Chinese that need to look at romanized names. Maybe the reason long term residents tend to want standard pinyin, and Hanyu Pinyin is an ISO standard as well being the UN and the world-wide standard, is because we’ve suffered through the experience of not being able to read the haphazard romanization on the signs here.

I’ve met quite a few people from each group who have a preference for using standard pinyin, and I haven’t met any who prefer Tongyong Pinyin. That isn’t surprising considering that it’s been revised multiple times, it takes more letters to spell out words than standard pinyin does, and it needlessly breaks compatibility with the system all the rest of the world uses.

Instead of assuming that we are saying we know what’s best for the Taiwanese, maybe Mr. Caltonhill should at least consider the possibility that we’re just trying to make life a bit easier for the next wave of foreigners who come here. That can’t be a bad thing for Taiwan. Not that I can see, at any rate.

Tone 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.
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Dueling Lăowài is a new feature on Toshuo.com. This is my rebuttal of Prince Roy’s arguments against adding tone marks to roadsigns. If you missed the opening arguments of our friendly debate, be sure to check them out!

Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part I- Mark’s opening argument.
Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part II- Prince Roy’s opening argument.

Mark’s Rebuttal

In part two of this series, Prince Roy made several arguments against adding tone marks to roadsigns, some excellent and others a bit mystifying to me. I’ll give a quick run-down of his reasons not to use tone marks on street signs, and then address them one by one:

• Making roadsigns with tone marks is expensive.
• Tone marks are useless, except for a small sub-set of foreigners who are students.
• Taiwanese people can’t read pinyin anyway
• It’s a lost cause- we’ll be lucky if Taiwan ever even manages to use standard pinyin uniformly.
• The PRC doesn’t include tone marks on its signs, despite the fact that they would be even more beneficial on the mainland, therefore Taiwan shouldn’t include them either

Signs with Tone Marks Are Cheap

I have to concede that there really isn’t a way to justify the cost of replacing roadsigns just to add something that only benefits character illiterate foreigners. That isn’t really what I was arguing when I talked about costs in my opening argument, though. Unless Jason S. and Matt come through on their offer to start a guerrilla graffiti campaign and add the tones themselves, it would be very expensive to add tone marks to the signs right now.

Fortunately, though, roadsigns are already replaced frequently. So, when analyzing the cost of putting tone marks on signs, it’s only really fair to look at the cost beyond that of signs without them. What are the costs, beyond those of just putting up a sign anyway? Considering the fact that the government already hires romanization “experts” to convert the street names into pinyin, and that adding tones is trivial, I can only think of one additional cost- paint. In other words, the additional costs of adding tone marks would be insignificant as long as a sign is going up anyway.

Many Character Illiterate People Can Read Tone Marks

Right now, Shida has over 5,000 Mandarin students, nearly all of whom can read pinyin tone marks. There are also dozens of other Chinese language programs for foreigners in the city. Aside from current students, there are also quite a few people who have previous learning experience. Every last one of my coworkers I’ve had for the last two years has been able to read pinyin with tones. Heck, I’ve even met people who’ve picked up a smattering of Chinese from the Lonely Planet Mandarin phrasebook and were able to get the right tones single syllables pretty reliably.

One final group that I think deserves to be mentioned is foreign spouses. Right now, one in five marriages in Taiwan involves a foreign spouse. I realize that many of these spouses have not studied Chinese before, but a large number do take advantage of the free instruction subsidized by the government. Regardless of whether pinyin is used in their classes or they are exclusively taught in zhuyin, they will learn the tones, and the pinyin on signs will be far easier for them to read than the characters, at least for the first several years.

For those who doubt the number of foreigners in Taiwan who can read tone marks, there’s a simple test. Write “mā má mă mà” on a piece of paper and then ask foreign looking people if they know what the tone marks are. I’m willing to bet that a sizable majority will be able to read them. I’m willing to bet beer.

Taiwanese People Can’t Read Pinyin

You’ve got me there. I would be surprised if I rode in cabs for hours on end before reaching a nearby destination if I were relying on a Taiwanese cab driver’s ability to read an address written in pinyin. But, so what? If the signs had tones, then passengers could just say the address with certainty. Even people who didn’t know any Chinese at all, didn’t have any local friends, and didn’t come with a company that could help them, could just run a pinyin address through one of the many free online tools to convert it to zhuyin, which the driver could read if necessary.

It’s a Lost Cause

It pains me to say it, but Prince Roy’s probably right about this point. Going on about tone marks isn’t very reasonable, considering that just a month ago I lived on a street less than a kilometer long that still managed to be romanized differently on the signs at each end of the street. My only defense is to hide behind the words of George Bernard Shaw:

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

The PRC Doesn’t Include Tone Marks on Its Signs

This is the part of his argument I understood the least. The PRC doesn’t have very good laws to protect foreign investors from being swindled. Considering how much more foreign investment the PRC attracts than Taiwan does, does that mean that Taiwan shouldn’t have good protections for foreign investors either? Of course, not. Tone marks on the signs all over China would be great. It would be great to have them here, too.

Conclusion

This wraps up my part of this Dueling Lăowài feature. Be sure the fourth and final part of the debate, Prince Roy’s rebuttal.

Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part IV- Prince Roy’s rebuttal.

Dueling Lăowài is a new feature on Toshuo.com. Each “duel” will consist of four pieces by two writers: each writer will write one opening argument and one rebuttal.

Mark’s Opening Argument:

As any student of Chinese knows, learning enough characters to really become literate is no small task. For some, such as myself, it’s proving to be a sisyphean ordeal. Fortunately for me, and everyone else who isn’t fully literate in Chinese characters yet, street signs and subway signs are often romanized. Operating under the assumption that signs are indeed romanized for the benefit of the people who need them, as opposed to purely for political ends, and drawing on my own experiences, I’ll explain why it would serve the best interest of the most people to include tone marks on the signs.

Like many westerners, I arrived in Taiwan knowing a only a little bit of Mandarin. Communication of any sort was difficult. At the beginning, I had to stay close to other foreigners, my English speaking co-teachers, and I had to approach things with quite a bit of patience. After a while, though, my spoken Chinese improved and I was able to do things like ask people for directions and take taxis with confidence. Now, I very rarely have any serious communication difficulties, but my reading is still pretty weak.

I know I’m not alone in this. I know many, many westerners here who can speak well enough, but only read 1000-2000 characters. That’s enough to get by in day to day, life, but there are many, many street signs that my western friends mentioned above can’t read. We can all read pinyin, though. In fact, just about anybody who’s taken even a single semester of Chinese can read pinyin and at least sound it out. Unfortunately, we don’t get nearly the mileage out of this pinyin ability that we could.

As we all know, the state of romanization in Taiwan is less than ideal. I remember wasting an hour once asking people where “tingshi” MRT station was before realizing that what I was really looking for was dĭngxī (頂溪). In the end, I was frustrated, I was pissed off, and I’d missed an interview as a result of getting lost. A few months later, I found Mark S.’s useful site, Romanization.com, and never had a problem with saying the names of MRT stations again.

In the three years that have gone by since then, most of Taibei city’s street signs and MRT stations have adopted standard (i.e. hanyu pinyin) spellings, and the whole nightmare of newcomers not knowing if they’re looking for “kuting”, “guting”, “kuding”, or “guding” MRT are over. However, I feel that there’s one more step to be taken that’s both inexpensive and useful to a large number of people for whom the romanized signs are intended, i.e., the people who can’t read Chinese characters with full literacy- street signs should have tone marks above the pinyin.

Even with the current, standardized pinyin, there’s no way for a person who reads “Guting” to know if the word is gŭtíng”, gūtìng, gùtíng, or one of thirteen other possible tone combinations. In the case of the Guting MRT, this isn’t a big problem. Even though character-illiterate foreigners will have no way of knowing how to pronounce the stop, there aren’t any other stops with ambiguous names. Sometimes, though, we aren’t so lucky. There are many streets, such as TóngĀn Jiē and TōngĀn Jiē[1], which share identical romaniations unless tone marks are used. In fact, I’ve personally wasted cab fares as a result of not being quite sure of the tone of a street name. While I haven’t had this problem in quite a while, I don’t have any sort of desire to see every new crop of beginning Chinese students here suffer all the same misfortunes I did.

The Costs of Adding Tone Marks

• Remaking road signs would be expensive. However, for new signs being made, adding tone marks would incur very few additional costs. The government is already paying consultants to romanize the signs to begin with. For anybody qualified to work as a “pinyin consultant”, converting characters into romanized text with tone marks should be no difficulty at all.
• Adding tone marks above each syllable could increase paint costs by a small amount.
• People who don’t know any Chinese whatsoever could just ignore the tone marks. However some may find the tone marks visually unappealing. Conversely, those who didn’t ignore the tones might even pick up a little bit more Chinese through regularly seeing romanized Chinese words that they hear frequently.

The Benefits of Adding Tone Marks

• With tone marks, pinyin is a fully-functional writing system. Anybody who has learned pinyin, which takes orders of magnitude less effort than becoming character-literate, can read any Mandarin word written in pinyin.
• Many, many foreigners here would have a smoother time asking for directions and getting around the city.
• Tone marks on street signs would be a boon to students hoping to learn Chinese from the living environment here.
• Identical street names would be disambiguated.

Closing

In my opinion, writing Chinese words with the Latin character set and neglecting tone marks is the equivalent of writing English words with dots in place of the vowels. Yes, it’s possible to guess the missing information from context, but it’s not a very complete writing system.

Be sure to read Prince Roy argument in favor of not putting tone marks on road signs!

Tone Marks on Roadsigns Part II- Prince Roy’s opening argument.

Notes
[1]ICompletelyAgreeWithMarkSThatInnerCapItalizationIsAVeryVeryBadThing. CursesUponJavaForEverPopularizingSuchAnAbomination.

While I was walking along the street in Shanghai, I noticed something unfamilar about some of the posters. They had pinyin for each character! Oh, what I wouldn’t give to have that in Taiwan!

Something you won’t see in Tawian Hosted on Zooomr

I’ve been posting a bit on a great new Taiwan podcasting blog, Wan An Taipei. First off, let me say it’s got the potential to be a great blog, and that JT’s English pronunciation is good enough that I couldn’t tell he was Taiwanese through the first half of his podcast that I listened too. One thing that struck me as odd though, was the way he said 晚安 and then “Taipei” right together. I’ve seen the handouts at the airports saying to pronounce it “tie-bay”. I know tons of foreigners ignore those. Still, it sounded weird to hear a Chinese guy to pronounce a Chinese name in the middle of a Chinese sentence based on a messed up romanization of said Chinese word. To me it was kind of like and English speaker pronouncing “tennis” as “tennie” the way a French person would, but doing so in the middle of an English sentence. Maybe it would be like this: “Let’s play tennie if it doesn’t rain tomorrow.” JT asked for feedback on his site, so I told him it sounded weird to me. Today, he posted a great question:

Recently there’s a question that really intrigues me. Why is Taipei not “Taibei”? It’s actually the first time that came across my mind.

I spent a while writing what is possibly the longest comment I’ve ever written on someone else’s blog. Then, I decided that if I’m interested enough in the topic to write so much, it might as well go on my blog. Here’s my comment in its entirety:

The reason is this: in the past, Taiwan used a method of romanization called Wade-Giles. Wade-Giles uses apostrophes to denote whether or not a sound is voiced. For example, “p” in pinyin is “p`” in Wade-Giles, while “b” is “p”. In a similar way, “k” in pinyin is “k`” in Wade-Giles, and “g” in pinyin is “k” in Wade-Giles.

Unfortunately, the Taiwanese government decided to use Wade-Giles WITHOUT the apostrophes. As a result, it became impossible to distinguish between voiced and unvoiced sounds. All p’s and b’s, were written as p’s; all k’s and g’s became k’s; and all t’s and d’s became t’s. Thus, all words that would be “taipei”, “taibei”, “daipei”, OR “daibei” in standard pinyin became “taipei” according to the ROC.

When I first moved to 臺北 (tái bĕi), all of the MRT stations used this horrible system. For example, 古亭 was written as “kuting”. From this, it was impossible for me to tell if those characters should be pronounced as “kuting”, “kuding”, “guting”, or “guding”. It turns out the third choice was the correct one (gŭ tíng).

I cannot even begin to explain how many difficulties I had asking people how to get to places back when I didn’t know many characters. Fortunately for everybody, the mayor of 臺北 (tái bĕi) actually listened when a lot of foreigners complained about this problem 3 years ago. Unlike most politicians who felt that romanization should be based on political agendas, he actually considered the needs of the people romanization was originally made for (non-Chinese speakers who can’t read hanzi).

Now, nearly all of the street signs (in Taibei) and MRT signs have been corrected and now use standard pinyin. The one biggest exception is the word “Taipei”. Since it has been a well known name for a long time, it is much harder to change its written form to match the way it is pronounced. Just think how long it took people to start writing “Beijing” instead of “Peking”. It may be just as long before “Taibei” starts appearing on street signs.

If any of you are interested in how to write words in Wade-Giles, there is conversion chart on Wikipedia.