I second that you are misled in the transliteration of Chinese characters. I shall outline the situation in the next part, focusing on Mainland China as the case of Taiwan is just historical residues.Sergio wrote:See:ipsen wrote:Pinyin is a transliteration system to aid non-native pronunciation of Chinese characters by approximating the Chinese sounds with the Latin alphabet. It is not a writing system per se. Although practically, any set of symbols if appropriately regulated among users can be considered a means of communication...
(Not that I know your exact allegiance, though...)
MrFaber had made a joke (at least, it seemed a joke to me) saying that Asian languages should abandon their ideographic systems (although Korean uses an alphabet, not an ideography) and adopt Latin at once.
I just said that his vindication would make sense to Japanese, as they are a monolingual country using three writing systems that are incomplete, and having to use Latin in some cases, resulting in a great confusion. It would be much more practical if they adopted Latin once for all.
Then I pointed out that such an idea would not be interesting in Chinese case, because the country has different languages using the same writing code.
When you told me that Mandarin has different writings in People's China and Taiwan, my theory became senseless, thus I said it would be better to adopt Pinyin at once. At least, it is the same both in People's China and Taiwan. Or am I mistaken?
In Mainland China, before the Communist regime, the official script was what is now known as Traditional Chinese. In 1956, the Mainland Communist government decided to adopt a simplified version of the said script (mostly through reducing the number of strokes of complicated characters) for educational-policy purposes; the Taiwanese Nationalist government on the other hand did not follow suit - that is why now there are two scripting system, although the large number of characters are really identical in both. So essentially, before 1956 there had been only one Chinese script and now two.
However, the story of Chinese phonology is more complicated. There are a multitude of dialects of the language, some of which are even unintelligible to speakers of others. The situation was identical before 1956. That is the reason for the adoption of a standard pronunciation for administrative purposes (e.g. governmental speeches) which is conveniently the Beijing pronunciation. The reason for such convenience is that the country's heavily centralised government has been more-or-less continuously located in Beijing since the 15th century. Also, due to its use in administration, Beijing Chinese has become known as Mandarin, literally 'Magistrate's talk'. Pinyin is really Beijing pronunciation recorded with the Latin alphabet.
The afore-mentioned circumstance has taken place for quite a while, but NOT to the exclusion of other dialects, say, Cantonese, Wu Chinese, Min Chinese. Those dialects continue to be spoken by residents in respective localities for almost everything BUT administrative use - that is, you cannot go and buy burgers at a McDonald's in Guangzhou with just knowledge of Mandarin. The total number of non-Mandarin native Chinese speakers are around 400-500 million. There are some transliteration systems for those dialects, but they have not gained official status, due to political centralisation.
As such, Pinyin is for Mandarin, appropriate for administrative Chinese in Mainland China, but not for all dialects of verbal Chinese. So if Pinyin were to be suddenly standardised as the national script, people who speak other dialects would nearly immediately be marginalised - they would just simply not be able to recognise the pronunciation, and thus unable to correlate the sound with the meaning. Just imagine what would happen if now English were to be 'standardised' in such a way that your everyday 'a' would have to be written with and pronounced 'u' - 'laptop' would be 'luptop', 'standard' would be 'stundurd' (still easy to recognise) and 'barrow' as 'burrow' (!) Now you tell me if you could easily adapt yourself into this ludicrous situation...
In Taiwan, the pronunciation in use is Min Chinese. Thus Pinyin would not be applicable to transliterate Chinese in Taiwan. If Pinyin is good for anything, then it is for Latin-alphabet users. Full stop!
**Summary**
This is a long post, so I shall summarise my main points:
- Mandarin is Beijing pronunciation.
- There are many other pronunciation systems existing due to evolutional reasons.
- Pinyin is the transliteration for use by Mandarin speakers and is not the correct transliteration of characters to speakers of other dialects.
- Standardising Pinyin would marginalise speakers of dialects other than Mandarin (totaling at about half a billion!)
- Pinyin does not solve the language problem between Mainland China and Taiwan.
