Why Does Pinyin Never Quite Work? | Daxiang Gonghui

The odd spelling rules of Hanyu Pinyin, the romanization Chinese people use every day, keep causing embarrassment. Why, for example, does Beijing have two English spellings, Peking and Beijing, while Shanghai has only one?

Pinyin is a tool no Chinese person can do without. You need it to learn to read, to get an ID card or passport, and to live abroad.

Yet it causes plenty of grief. Foreigners never seem to get the hang of reading it. Few of them can pronounce the surname Xing correctly; a Miss Quan may find herself turned into Miss Guan. Beijing's Fuxingmen gate has the worst luck of all: the spelling "Fuxing" invites an unfortunate reading.

Even famous universities seem to resist pinyin. Peking University will not be Beijing University; Qinghua University calls itself Tsinghua University; and Xiamen University goes furthest, styling itself Amoy University, a name that baffles almost everyone.

Why does pinyin look the way it does? And where did these university names come from?

Who Uses Pinyin

To explain why pinyin is the way it is, we first need to know what it is for.

Every country has its own writing system. Once people come into contact with a group that writes differently — to trade, to exchange ideas, or simply to learn each other's language — they need a way to write their own words in the other script.

Between most major alphabets the letters correspond fairly neatly, so designing a transcription scheme is relatively easy. Romans and Greeks dealt with each other constantly, and the Romans settled on a standard way of writing Greek words in Latin letters. Conversion between the two was almost mechanical: the Greek letters Γ, Δ, Η, Θ, Ξ and Ψ became G, D, E, TH, X and PS.

Chinese characters, however, do not purely record sound, so matching them to an alphabet letter by letter is impossible.

Until modern times the Chinese themselves rarely needed to spell their language phonetically, and writing Chinese in an alphabet was uncommon. It happened mostly among groups who, for one reason or another, had drifted outside mainstream Han culture. When the Tibetans occupied Dunhuang, local Han Chinese for a time wrote Chinese in Tibetan letters. Some Hui Muslims in the northwest wrote to one another in Chinese spelled with Arabic letters, a script known as Xiao'erjing.

So the early designers and users of Chinese romanization were mostly foreigners.

By the Han dynasty at the latest, China was dealing with peoples who wrote in other scripts. They recorded Chinese sounds in their own letters, producing the first rough romanizations. Sogdian merchants trading in China spelled dian ("shop") as tym; Arab merchants arriving in Guangzhou wrote the city as khanfu, from its old name Guangfu.

These early spellings were scattered and unsystematic. They transcribed the personal names, place names and loanwords their users needed, and made no attempt to romanize the language as a whole.

Romanization proper began with the Western missionaries who started arriving in China during the Ming dynasty.

To preach to the Chinese, the missionaries threw themselves into learning the language. Spoken Chinese was manageable; the characters were a far steeper climb. So they hit on the idea of spelling Chinese in Latin letters and compiling dictionaries to help them learn.

The first missionaries to romanize Chinese systematically were Matteo Ricci and Michele Ruggieri. Between 1583 and 1588 they compiled a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary using a romanization of their own design. Their scheme laid the foundation for later missionary systems, but it never spread itself and was soon forgotten.

Far more influential was Xiru Ermu Zi (An Aid to the Ears and Eyes of Western Scholars), published in 1626 by the missionary Nicolas Trigault, which records the pronunciation of late-Ming Mandarin. Because it was made to help Westerners learn Chinese, its spellings followed French and Latin conventions: the initial of ran was written j, and the final -ng was written -m, so shuang became xoam.

After Trigault, missionaries devised romanizations of their own one after another. Like his, these were built for the convenience of Western learners, so the spellings varied with the missionary's homeland and where in China he worked. The single syllable zhuang was written chuang by the English, tchouang by the French and, outdoing everyone, tschoeang by the Dutch.

The schemes did share some features. They marked the difference between unaspirated and aspirated consonants with a symbol, so the initials of bo/po, duo/tuo and ge/ke were written p/p', t/t' and k/k'. Letters such as b and d, which in Western languages usually stand for voiced sounds, were mostly left unused, because Mandarin has no exact equivalents.

Many missionaries working outside Mandarin-speaking areas also designed romanizations for local dialects. In the Min-speaking region especially, Foochow Romanized for the Fuzhou dialect and Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Southern Min spread widely and were used to teach in local schools. Min differs sharply from other kinds of Chinese; many of its words have no character, so writing everyday speech in characters is hard, and many local people adopted these romanizations as their main written language. As late as the 1950s, Dr. Lin Qiaozhi still wrote her scripts for radio broadcasts to Taiwan in the missionaries' Pe̍h-ōe-jī.

But all these systems stayed local. Most served one place for a while and went no further. A romanization with real nationwide reach did not appear until the end of the 19th century.

In 1892 the Englishman Herbert Giles revised the system Thomas Wade had designed in 1859, producing Wade-Giles. In many places Wade-Giles already looks like modern pinyin: it spells ao just as pinyin does, for instance, and writes the initial of chan as ch'. Compared with earlier schemes it was simple, consistent, and accurate in recording sounds, and it quickly became the first widely used romanization of Chinese.

Wade-Giles was the most common romanization before today's pinyin. Yet by its rules, Beijing would be Peiching, Xiamen would be Hsiamên and Qinghua would be Ch'inghua — none of them the names these universities use today.

So where did Peking, Tsinghua and Amoy come from?

In 1906 an imperial postal conference in Shanghai called for a single, standard way of spelling Chinese place names in Latin letters, to make the mail run more smoothly. Before this, Robert Hart, the Englishman who served as Inspector General of Customs, had already asked local postal chiefs to settle on romanized place names. Hart wanted each place spelled according to local pronunciation, but most postmasters simply handed in the Wade-Giles spellings already in use.

At the time the French ran the top of China's postal service, and they disliked the strongly English flavor of Wade-Giles. So the 1906 conference settled on a hybrid. It kept many sound distinctions that Beijing speech had already lost but older Mandarin still had. It separated the "sharp" and "rounded" initials (Tsingtao for Qingdao, Chungking for Chongqing) and kept traces of the old checked tone (Wusih for Wuxi, Kwangsi for Guangxi). Places in the Min and Cantonese regions, following Hart's instructions, were usually spelled in the local dialect: Fatshan for Foshan, Shiuhing for Zhaoqing, Amoy for Xiamen. (In today's Xiamen dialect men, "gate," is pronounced mng, but early Xiamen speech was closer to that of Zhangzhou, where it was pronounced mui — hence "moy.") This scheme is known as Postal romanization.

Why are the English names of Peking University, Tsinghua University and Xiamen University so odd? Because they all use Postal spellings. Tsinghua is Qinghua spelled in old Mandarin; Amoy is Xiamen in Southern Min.

Exonyms

Peking is the strangest case. It is neither the old Mandarin pronunciation of Beijing nor a dialect one. It is Beijing's exonym: under the rules of Postal romanization, a city that already had a foreign name kept it.

What is an exonym?

An exonym is a name a foreign language uses for a place that differs from the place's own name. They are common. In English, China is not Zhongguo but China, Egypt is not Miṣr but Egypt, and Germany is Germany, not the German Deutschland.

A place usually gets an exonym because it matters. Over long use, foreigners stop following the local name and settle on one of their own.

In the same way, London, Britain's most famous city, has exonyms in many European languages: Londres in French and Spanish, Londra in Italian.

Exonyms are found everywhere, and China's great cities have long had names of their own in foreign tongues.

Around 311 CE, during the uprisings of the "Five Barbarians," China fell into chaos. A group of Sogdian merchants trading in China wrote letters home to Samarkand. The letters, written in Sogdian, were intercepted west of the Yumen Pass and never arrived.

One was sent by a Sogdian merchant living in Jincheng (today's Lanzhou) to his employer. In outline, it reports that China has been thrown into turmoil… the people in Jiuquan and Guzang are safe… a great famine has struck Luoyang. The last emperor has fled Luoyang too. The palaces and walls of Luoyang have burned; they are gone. Luoyang is no more! Ye is no more! The Xiongnu have even taken Chang'an… only yesterday they were the emperor's subjects! We do not know whether the remaining Chinese can drive them out of Chang'an and out of China… Four years ago our caravan was in Luoyang; the Indians and Sogdians there all starved to death…

The way the letter writes Chinese place names is revealing. Luoyang appears as srγ, Chang'an as 'xwmt'n, Ye as 'nkp', Guzang as kc'n and Jincheng as kmzyn.

The Sogdian names for Ye, Guzang and Jincheng are all transcriptions of how those places were pronounced in old Chinese. Only Chang'an and Luoyang, the two most important cities in China at the time, go by exonyms.

The letter is not an isolated case. The Sogdian text of the epitaph in the Northern Zhou tomb of Shi Jun, found in Xi'an, also writes Chang'an as 'xwmt'n. Seventh-century Byzantine texts call Chang'an Χουβδάν (Khubdan); later Persian and Arabic books call it Khumdan. The eighth-century Nestorian Stele gives Chang'an as Khoumdan and Luoyang as Sarag. And Fanyu Zaming (Miscellaneous Sanskrit Names), compiled by the Tang monk Li Yan at the height of the dynasty, shows that Sanskrit then called Chang'an Kumudana and Luoyang Saraga.

Scholars still disagree about where these names for Chang'an and Luoyang came from. One theory traces Khumdan to the Old Chinese pronunciation of Xianyang; Sarag may be related to Seres, an ancient Western name for China. Either way, that the two cities had such foreign names shows how important they were in medieval China.

In later centuries Beijing, as the capital, naturally gathered more exonyms than any other Chinese city: Peking in English, Pékin in French, Pechino in Italian, Pequín or Pekín in Spanish. The other Chinese city rich in exonyms is Guangzhou: Canton in English, French and Italian, Cantón in Spanish, Cantão in Portuguese (all from "Guangdong"), plainly a legacy of its long history as a great trading port.

Shanghai, by contrast, grew into China's largest city only after the 19th century. Its history was too short for it to acquire an exonym, so Shanghai University could not give itself a distinctive foreign name the way Peking University did.

But Shanghai soon stopped being at a disadvantage.

In 1957 the new Hanyu Pinyin scheme appeared, and the purpose of romanization changed at its root. The original goal was to replace Chinese characters altogether. When that proved impractical, the aim became helping people learn to read and spreading Mandarin. Pinyin, in other words, was made mainly for Chinese people. Whether its spellings suited foreign habits did not matter; what mattered was a simple, efficient system. The new pinyin used all 26 letters, and how foreigners would read Fuxing, Xing or Quan was never a concern.

Although pinyin was meant mainly for use at home, it was also handed the glorious mission of becoming the only accepted way to write Chinese in Latin letters. From 1978, foreign-language publications printed in China had to use pinyin for Chinese proper names, and in 1982 the International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as the standard romanization of Chinese. At China's firm insistence, all Chinese names were to be romanized in pinyin, and exonyms such as Peking and Canton gradually gave way to Beijing and Guangzhou.

And so, at least in foreign languages, the thousand-year-old imperial capital and the century-old upstart Shanghai finally stand on equal terms.

*** This article comes from the WeChat official account Daxiang Gonghui (http://www.idaxiang.org/). Knowledge, insight, experience: it is neither traditional media nor the new media now in fashion, but a product that enriches our knowledge, insight and experience with original content.**