Better Mandarin Chinese Romanization

A simple proposal for improved Chinese romanization.

For many years now, longer than I've been alive, China has been becoming increasingly important to Western and English-speaking people. Along with the importance of the country comes the importance of Chinese-language terms, names, and concepts that cannot be expressed with existing English words, or possibly even spelling.

I am thinking specifically now of Mandarin Chinese, Beijing dialect, which is represented by Hanyu pinyin. Hanyu pinyin is currently the best development for translating the sounds of Mandarin in the Roman alphabet for pronunciation by English speakers. Hanyu pinyin translates the aural language quite well. One challenge though, with translating Mandarin is that it is a tonal language. Hanyu pinyin approaches the challenge with diacritics placed above the latin vowels. A rising tone looks like an acute accent: á. There are three other tones also: ā ǎ à.

Unfortunately, what often happens in newspapers and other articles is that the tone marks are removed. Some people have argued that this is because of the technical limitations of print, but I don't think this is the case.

I think it's done because tone markings are pretty much nonsensical to a typical English-speaking reader. They can work out a basic pronunciation for a Chinese borrowing by applying the English rules to the letters that appear, but the accents are meaningless at best, and misleading at worst, since these symbols are used with totally other meaning in languages that might be more familiar to English-speakers, notably French with its acute and grave accents. This leaves most typical Mandarin borrowings only partially complete with regard to sound.

Again unfortunately, for the slightly more educated English reader, one who does have a passing familiarity with the Mandarin language, a Hanyu pinyin term stripped of its tonal marks is rather meaningless also. If the term is a proper name or a brand name, there is little chance of the average English speaker being able to guess or even begin to look up the Mandarin meaning or proper pronunciation of the name. It stands alone as a neologism in the English language, and it is not likely to be able to ever be connected back to the original Mandarin.

What I propose then, instead of tonal marks, which Academics add and newspaper editors strip away, is that Hanyu pinyin should be adapted to use silent final consonants to indicate tone. Newspapers are less likely to strip away a silent final consonant, since the average English reader is used to words with unpronounced finals. These would allow the middling-educated reader, like me, to glean more information about pronounciation from a popular article, and therefore be better able to look up the word in a Chinese-English dictionary, or even recall it from memory. And less-familar readers would be no worse off.

Here are my simple rules:

1. High steady tone. No extra consonant. This would look the same as the stripped newspaper version of Hanyu pinyin that appears everywhere already. Yāng => Yang

2. Rising tone. Follow with u, w, or y. Put a "w" after the vowel if the vowel is a, u, or ü (expect this to be replaced by "u" or "yu" in some publications). If the vowel is i, put a "y" after it. If the vowel is e, put a "u" after it. In the case of a vowel pair, go by the second vowel. If the vowel is followed by n or ng, the silent y or w goes before it. Example: Yáng => Yawng

a -> w
e -> u
i -> y
everything else -> w

3. Falling-rising tone. Double the vowel*. If it's a vowel pair, double the last vowel. Example: Yǎng => Yaang.

Special: In words where "oo" and "ee" appear, I suggest diareses, when possible. Example: Hě => Heë (acceptable variants: Heè, Heé, Hee). Bǒ = Boö (or Boò or Boó or Boo)

4. Falling tone. Put an h after the vowel. Yàng => Yahng

5. Neutral tone. Put an apostrophe after the vowel. (Optionally, this can be left off, making it visually identical to the first tone, but this is not too much of a problem since the neutral tone can be determined by context.) Ma => Ma'





*[Note that doubling the vowel is already used in a select few cases, for example, the Chinese province of Shaanxi would be distinguished from Shanxi only by the tone mark, but the official Chinese romanization doubles the vowel to represent the falling-rising tone.]

To an average English speaker with no Mandarin, "yawng" or "yahng" reads exactly the same as "yang". They're equally foreign, and yet the letters are familiar enough so that they can make a guess at pronunciation.

They might be fooled into thinking that the spelling affects the quality of the vowel, but I'm not worried about this for two reasons. First, English readers usually get the vowel wrong already. "Yang" should almost rhyme with English "long", but English speakers usually rhyme it with "hang".

Second, I feel that the benefit of distinguishing the tones is worth the drawback of losing some clarity of vowels. I have been led to believe that the quality of the tone is as important to Mandarin speakers as the quality of the vowel. Perhaps in some cases it is even more important to get the tone right than the vowel. I think it's better to get both components of the word partially right, than to get only one partially right (the vowel) and completely ignore the other (the tone).

Some examples:

Máo Zédōng (Mao Tse-tung) => Maow Zeudong

Hú Jǐntāo => Huw Jiintao

Jiǎng Zhōngzhèng (Chiang Kai-shek) => Jiaang Zhongzhehng

Mǎ Yīngjiǔ (Ma Ying-jeou) => Maa Yingjiuu

Zhōngguó => Zhongguow

Běijīng => Beiijing

Táiběi (Taipei) => Taiybeii