To cross into a suburb of Taipei, for example, but encounter signs spelling its name as Xindian, Hsien-tien, Sindian, Shindian and Shintien, is just too confusing.
With the government’s transition to Hanyu Pinyin as the standard for Mandarin Romanization said to be approaching its final stage, the goal of spelling consistency may not be too far off. But what exactly does it mean to Romanize Chinese?
First of all, one must understand that writing is not language itself, but a representation of language. Any type of writing is a set of agreed-upon marks on some sort of surface (paper, blackboards and computer screens). Given the complexity of spoken language, no written script can encode everything, and so choices have to be made.
An alphabetic script, familiar to educated English speakers and many others, chooses to represent individual sounds in its letters. In a pure alphabet, one letter stands for one sound, and only one sound. In actual application alphabets are never pure, again due to the inherent complexity of language, as well as cultural and historical factors.
An alphabet is not the only way to go when trying to put language into conventionalized marks, however. To simplify, instead of individual sounds the written symbols can represent syllables, as in Japanese hiragana and katakana. They can represent only consonants (as in written Hebrew and Arabic), or a consonant plus a standard vowel, with diacritics added to indicate other vowels (as in written Hindi, Tibetan and Thai). They can also stand for individual sounds combined into syllable blocks (as in Hangul, the Korean script).
Written Chinese takes another tack. Characters stand for a meaning unit of one syllable, which fits the spoken language well, since the smallest units of meaning (morphemes, in linguistic terms) are almost all of one syllable. The majority of characters also include a hint to pronunciation.
But like any other form of writing, it has to be learned, and so foreigners who do not have the opportunity to learn the script have no way of even guessing what characters mean or how to pronounce them.
To Romanize Chinese writing, then, is to take the pronunciation of Chinese (Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hakka, Cantonese or any other variety) and represent it with letters of the Roman alphabet. This does not mean “writing Chinese in English,” (or in any other language written in the Latin alphabet), but adapting the Roman letters to stand for the individual sounds of Chinese, and combining them to spell the morpheme-syllables that characters correspond to.
Because languages employ different sets of individual sounds, there are Chinese sounds that do not exist in English. Thus, no matter what system of Romanization is used, there will be familiar letters representing unfamiliar sounds. People who read English may feel some usages are more “natural” or “unnatural,” but readers of German or Spanish are likely to feel differently.
The casual visitor to Taiwan, or foreigner working full-time, may never have the time or opportunity to study how Romanization works.
What they need, then, is a consistent system, spelled the same everywhere and in all contexts they will run into, so that through use they can gradually become familiar with it, and recognize street names as being the same on different maps and street signs, and look up names, places and terms in guidebooks, libraries or online.
One obstacle to the convenience of consistency in Taiwan that may never disappear is the habits of established usage, so that internationally well-known place names are spelled according to different systems of Romanization—Taipei, Keelung, Kinmen and Kaohsiung, for example (respectively, Taibei, Jilong, Jinmen and Gaoxiong in Hanyu Pinyin Romanization). Similarly, individuals have been free to spell their names in Romanized form as they see fit, resulting in personal names in several different systems of Romanization, as well as many idiosyncratic spellings.
Place names in Taiwan often reflect a very distinctive history involving aboriginal names and local history. “Kaohsiung,” for instance, began as an indigenous word meaning “bamboo grove,” which in Taiwanese sounded like “beat a dog.” Later, during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945) the Taiwanese sound, something like “takau,” was written in kanji, Chinese characters used in Japanese. These two characters pronounced in Mandarin then gave us “Kaohsiung,” spelled in the old Wade-Giles Romanization. With this in mind, some old or idiosyncratic spellings may help serve as reminders of Taiwan’s long and rich history.
Still, with the application of one and the same system to all places, street names and specialized products of Taiwan without established Romanized spellings, Romanized usage will become much easier for foreigners who do not have the opportunity to learn Chinese, and Taiwan will become that much more internationally user-friendly.
—Ray Eiseley is a free-lance writer based in Chiayi City. These views are the author’s and not necessarily those of “Taiwan Today.” Copyright 2009 by Ray Eiseley
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