Romanization

I notice things.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised when I point something out to my Chinese coworkers that they had never noticed before.  A few days ago, I went out to lunch with some of them to a Hong Kong chain restaurant called Tsui Wah.  I was having trouble pronouncing the name (per usual) but blamed it on the Romanization in this case.

They had no idea what I was talking about.

Remember my matrix of written & spoken Chinese?  Well, there’s another layer of complexity for Westerners.  Since almost none of us can read or write 中文 we’ve been forced to resort to coaxing the sounds of Chinese words into Latin letters.  Hilarity ensues.

For a long time, the dominant romanization system was Wade-Giles (invented in the mid-19th century.)  “Tsui Wah” is Wade-Giles, for example.  But in the 1950s, the Chinese invented their own romanization system called 拼音 (Pīnyīn, meaning “spell sound”.)  In 1982 this was adopted as the international standard.

“Běijīng” in Pinyin is rendered as “Pei-ching” in Wade-Giles.  “Hēilóngjiāng” in Pinyin is rendered as “Hei-lung-chiang” in Wade-Giles.  “Zhōnghuá rénmín gònghéguó” in Pinyin is rendered as “Chung-hua jen min kung ho kuo” in Wade-Giles.  Even though, theoretically, each is supposed to sound exactly the same.  Madness.

But there are also other, more rare romanization systems.

There are two Chinese provinces whose names are only differentiated by tone:  山西 (Shānxī, meaning “West of the Mountains”) and 陕西 (Shǎnxī, meaning “Land west of Shǎn”.)  If you don’t write the tone marks, the names look exactly the same in Latin letters.  So, the Chinese borrowed a trick from a third romanization system called 国语罗马字 (Guóyǔ luómǎzì, literally meaning “National Language Rome Characters”, or sometimes known as Gwoyeu Romatzyh.)  In Gwoyeu Romatzyh, tones are indicated as changes in spelling.  An “a” in the third tone (written as “ǎ” in Pinying) is rendered as “aa”.  The Chinese borrowed this trick to differentiate Shanxi province from Shaanxi province.

“Haven’t you guys ever wondered why Shaanxi has that double ‘a’ in it?”  They hadn’t noticed.