We're not doing history in this lesson. No, I'm gonna attempt the best explanation I can manage of a topic that drove me stark raving bugnuts for a while when I first started developing this case of rampant Sinophilia: the conversion from Chinese written ideograms to the phonetic alphabet we know and love, aka the process of romanization. I freely admit it's something of a detour, but it puzzled me a great deal when I first encountered discrepancies between the names Barry Hughart had for historical figures, and the names I turned up in the library...
The Chinese system of writing, like I said a while back, was designed to encode
meaning rather than phonetics. True, a lot of characters include elements that
are there as pronunciation guides, but that's not the same thing. There's thousands
upon thousands of characters in written Chinese - to the best of my knowledge,
somewhere close to forty thousand. You need to know roughly three to four thousand
to be reasonably literate. It's a time consuming process and there's not much
cure for it but memorization. Each character represents one syllable's worth
of ideas, but the only way to know what it sounds like is to engrave it in your
memory.
The Roman alphabet - the one used for the English language - is a set of characters
used to encode spoken sound. There are, I believe, forty-four phonemes in the
standard spoken English language. Each letter might indicate a single phoneme,
or might be part of another, larger phoneme, and the only way to know what the
whole mess means is to 'sound it out' until the spoken word corresponds to the
meaning in your memory.
I think you begin to see the problem.
Serious suggestions have been made in the past about switching Chinese writing
over to an alphabetic script. The most recent go-round of this came in the 1920s
and 1930s, to the best of my knowledge - it was part of the whole rush to join
up with the modern world. While it would certainly have made printing easier,
since you'd only have to have one print element for each of a limited set of
sounds rather than enough print elements to cover an ENTIRE LANGUAGE'S VOCABULARY,
the idea was ultimately tossed. The country has, literally, hundreds
of dialects. Many of them are fundamentally incompatible with each other in
spoken form, but each and every one relies on the same written form. Taking
the ideographic script away and replacing it with a written alphabet would mean
that people in, say, Shanghai no longer wrote the same language with people
in Hong Kong, let alone people way out west in Uighur territory. It would essentially
mean kicking the struts out from under the entire population in terms of maintaining
national unity. Didn't fly. In the late 1950s and early 1960s the People's Republic
of China moved to simplify the written characters, figuring this would make
them easier to learn. (This didn't happen in Hong Kong and Taiwan, for obvious
reasons.) They also came up with an official way of rendering the sounds of
Chinese into the Roman alphabet, called Pinyin. The idea there was to make it
easier to teach correct pronunciation, not to replace the character script.
Now, under normal circumstances, this would've been great. "Look, Ma! A system
of writing a foreign language in an at least marginally familiar form, created
by actual speakers of the language! We can finally spell their words
consistently and well, and we'll know we're getting it right, because it's the
way they would do it!" Lovely thought, honestly, except for one tiny
problem... there was already a system in use for doing this exact thing.
Wayyyyyy back in the beginnings of serious contact between China and the west,
efforts had been made to render the sounds of the language accurately. There
were quite a few of these systems floating around, including one put together
in 1815 by a priest named Morrison. Morrison's system caught the attention of
Thomas Wade, the Chinese language secretary to the British embassy in China,
and in 1867 Wade sat down and wrote out a book called "Teach Yourself Chinese".
The book included his adaptation of Morrison's system. Wade was apparently sufficiently
popular that forty-five years after the fact, H. A. Giles picked up his system,
made a few slight modifications to it, and published a Chinese English Dictionary.
BAM, we have the Wade-Giles system of romanization.
Wish I knew why the word 'romanization' doesn't get capitalized, but I'm not
gonna argue.
Anyway, Wade-Giles was already being used in an awful lot of places, like on
maps, and in books, and in universities and other places of study the world
over. Pinyin got adapted in a big fat hairy hurry within China itself because,
well, the government said so, dammit. The rest of the world took a while longer.
Some users didn't change which system they were relying on at all. Neither Taiwan
nor Hong Kong was exactly in the mood to listen to the words of the mainland,
which meant that a lot of folks in other parts of the world didn't bother listening
either, since that would've meant having to pick up another way of spelling
things. It's one thing to switch from writing 'Peking' to 'Beijing' on your
maps, and quite another to change all the terms and phrases in your monographs,
essays, and texts.
(Bear in mind, now, that these are just TWO of the systems that were ever used
and that are still in use today. There's at least four others, most notably
Yale, which was created in 1948 to make teaching the US military a simpler matter,
and Gwoyeu Romatzyh, created in 1928 to spell out the different tones that distinguish
one word from another.)
The point of all this is that both systems of rendering Chinese pronunciation
into the English alphabet still have a powerful hold in various arenas, regardless
of what the official standard is. (Pinyin, for the record.) I was unaware of
this when I first started getting really interested in Chinese history and culture.
I knew that the Chinese capital city had been called Peking for years, but was
supposed to be called Beijing now. Didn't know why, assumed it was part of the
same worldwide surge towards renaming cities and countries that had turned Dutch
Guiana into Suriname and Rhodesia into Zimbabwe. I would say 'go ahead and laugh',
but at the time I was all of fourteen or fifteen years old. I honestly didn't
know better. At the time, I had a tendency to pull a book at random from the
science fiction/fantasy section of the New Books shelf pretty much every time
I went to the library. One week a bright yellow dust jacket caught my eye. Something
called The
Story Of The Stone, which promised 'an ancient China that never was'.
Ooo, promising...
I took it home, and I read it, and I reread it, and I racked up an enormous
overdue fine on it. Barry Hughart used the Wade-Giles system. His spellings
were my first real exposure to Chinese words or names rendered into English.
When, years later, Larry
Gonick's Cartoon History of the Universe 2 hit the market, Gonick also
used Wade-Giles. Gonick took huge chunks of his Chinese history from a volume
by a man whose name I recognized. The Story of the Stone had repeatedly
mentioned the great historian Ssu-ma Ch'ien, and here was all this lovely stuff
he'd written, being referenced thousands of years later! This was fantastic!
I had to find his book somewhere and read it myself!
How was I supposed to know the man's stuff wasn't gonna be found under any spelling
other than 'Sima Qian'? Thank you SO much, guys.
Eventually I realized there were different ways of spelling Chinese words, but
I had no idea which spellings were supposed to be used with each other. Transliterating
Chinese wasn't high on my list of priorities at the time. Ultimately, though,
I got things cleared up - ultimately. As in, oooh, roughly a year ago. Not until
AFTER I had named my American-born Chinese Akashic Brother character in a friend's
Mage game. By the time I realized I was using a spelling that no longer really
conformed with much of anything in the way of 'official' documents or easily
available dictionaries or texts, it was too late. The name had been established
using a Wade-Giles spelling, and trying to change the spelling to something
more accurate would've just made a mess with the other characters. The rest
of his family got Pinyin. I haven't bothered trying to explain this IC'ly, mostly
because, well, nobody else seems to have noticed.
Gonna notice now, though. See, some spellings only exist in one romanization
system or the other. We'll use my poor schlub of a Mage to demonstrate. His
name, as I've been rendering it, is Hsiang Ho. The 'hs' at the start of the
surname syllable is a dead giveaway. The official Pinyin system doesn't include
that spelling anywhere. You can't start a Pinyin syllable with 'hs' or 'ts',
they're not on the list of official possible spellings. The appropriate spelling
of his family name would actually be Xiang. Pinyin eliminated a lot of confusion
that arose out of a somewhat limited choice of sounds in Wade-Giles. That X
at the start of Ho's family name is unique to the Pinyin system. So are any
syllables that start with B, D, G, Q, or Z. Just not gonna happen if you're
using the Wade-Giles rules. Q represents a lot of the 'ch' sounds, as in Sima
Qian's personal name and as in Qin Shihuangdi, the first real Emperor of China,
and even as in the last Imperial dynasty before the revolution, the Qing. X
covers anything that started with an 'hs' under Wade-Giles - Xiang instead of
Hsiang, for example. Or, to go back to the last post, Xia instead of Hsia, the
dynasty founded by Emperor Yu.
Other distinguishing points include syllable endings. If the word terminates
in the letters 'ung', 'ueh', 'ieh', 'en', or 'ien', your author is almost certainly
using Wade-Giles. If they're using Pinyin, they'd have used 'ong', 'ue', 'ie',
'an', or 'ian' instead. There's a lot of other differences, too. For
example, there's a lot more apostrophes in the Wade-Giles system (although they're
not really apostrophes, but I don't know the difference), and a lot more umlauts.
Wade-Giles allows for pretty liberal use of the hyphen (Ssu-ma, remember?) in
multi-syllable words, but you don't see it in Pinyin. A name completely broken
down into three separate words for three separate syllables is probably being
rendered under Wade-Giles, though not necessarily; Pinyin allows you to join
certain syllables together (i.e., Mao Zedong instead of Mao Tse Tung).
Even some of the vowels are rendered differently. The o in my Akashic's personal
name is one such case, as the newer system renders that sound with the letter
'e' instaed. Given that there was a brief spate of dwarf jokes ("Hi, Ho!") when
I started playing him, I didn't want to change the spelling to the more 'official'
one and go through more of that kind of thing. Especially not since one of the
other characters tends to greet people with 'Hey, Doc' or 'Hey, Janey' or something
of that sort. 'Hey, He' just didn't seem like it was in the cards. Nevertheless,
since everyone else in the family uses the Pinyin system for their names, Hsiang
Ho's diploma from Johnson and Wales University almost certainly reads 'Xiang
He' instead.
And yes, the names are... on the inaccurate side, in the case of my characters.
Most Chinese names have three characters. At the time I created these guys,
I was a little bit stuck for real names - I didn't know what any of them meant
yet - so I turned to Larry Gonick. Ooo, look, big mean scary man named Hsiang
Yu with memorable line. ("YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHH.") Originally
I'd used the big mean scary man's name, Hsiang Yu, as the name of a Chinese-American
Shadow Lord Ahroun (please don't throw things at me). I decided to steal the
family name and switch the given name, but had no comprehension that there might
possibly be any other names involved. As a consequence, the entire family got
slapped with names that were one character short. Eventually I'll go back and
retcon everybody's names into the right place, but for now, it is entirely the
fault of the ignorant state I was in when I began playing the character that
Ho is stuck with the name he has.
As for the meaning of the name - I was trying to pick something that sounded
decent and had a reasonable meaning with the assistance of zhongwen.com.
I knew 'xiang' was acceptable as a surname, because, well, Xiang Yu. I also
knew that there were different ways of writing the surname, and I thought about
the meanings for a while. Eventually, I decided that most of the family used
the classical rendition of the surname, but that Ho's father was looked on as
being something of a nutcase compared to the rest of the family. When he emigrated
to America he took to writing it with the character used for 'auspicious'. His
first son eventually got named Yu after the tamer of floods, and his younger
son got named Ho using the character for river. Ho's father was also named Yu,
but being just a little bit more passionate about his restaurant business than
was strictly healthy, he used the character that meant 'fish'. Of course, the
names were not as relevant as they might have been, because Ho's father had
been converted by missionaries and insisted on using English names whenever
possible, which meant that his oldest boy was Peter, his younger son was Andrew,
and his own name was James.
It's not much of an excuse, but it's all the excuse I've got. The character
I currently play at Ashes, Fang, changed his given name to a single character
after a particularly disastrous school interview when he was fourteen - but
his milk name was Jingqi (am I spelling 'surprise' right?) and his school name
was Qiaomiao (ingenious). At least I knew a little better on that one.
If you want more gory details, you can always stop by one of the following
places. God knows these folks are infinitely better choices than me. They're
real linguists. I'm just in this for my own entertainment.
http://www.loc.gov/catdir/pinyin/difference.html
http://www.wlu.edu/~hhill/tlit.html
http://www.mandarintools.com/pyconverter_old.html
- This one's neat. It lets you type in a word in one of the romanization systems
and click on a button to see it in one of the others. For some reason the last
option on the list is 'French'. I'm not sure I want to know about that.