The Problem With Pinyin

拼音惹的祸 

Minding your P's and Q's has taken on a whole new meaning for foreigners in China who wrestle with the many pinyin variations.
“谨言慎行”这四个字对于生活在中国的老外们来说别有一番滋味，因为他们正为五花八门的拼音书写所困扰。

Picture this - you're in Shanghai, sitting in a hotel room, with five different maps of the city sprawled on the bed before you, and you're trying to logistically plan a day in this grand city. You know some Chinese characters, enough to find your way around with, so you look for the Chinese characters on the street maps. That sounds simple enough, doesn't it? Unfortunately, two of the maps before you have wildly different pinyin where the Chinese characters should be.
设想一下这幅情景，你坐在上海一家宾馆的房间里，床前散乱地摆放着五张上海地图，你正筹划着在这座大都市的一日行程。你认识些汉字，找到要去的地方不成问题，因此你在道路交通图上努力寻找代表这些地名的汉字。这听起来似乎很简单吧。遗憾的是，在其中的两幅地图上，本应标注汉字的地方却标注着两种截然不同的拼音。

I should make a brief introduction. For the past seven months, I've been living in Wuhan, central China, a place with about a 10th the amount of English that Shanghai boasts, so I've learned some characters over that time from a mixture of pleasure and necessity. And the reason that I had five maps before me is that different things are marked on different maps. For instance, traffic maps versus sightseeing maps, and maps that mark things like English bookshops and arts precincts.
我还要简单地介绍一下。七个月来我一直住在中国的中部城市武汉。在武汉，英语使用量仅相当于上海的十分之一，因此在这段时间里我学会了一些汉字，这既是出于对汉语的兴趣，也是迫于现实的需要。我之所以拿了五张地图是因为不同的地图所标注的东西不一样。例如，交通地图、旅游观光地图和那些标注了英文书店和艺术社区的地图所关注的内容各不相同。

Introductions over, let's get back to pinyin. Let's be frank here, what use is a language if it has different spellings everywhere? I found Shanghai to be coated in differently spelled pinyin, and the phrasebook I have from Australia is an even worse offender. For instance, I've seen one of the most common characters in China, "中" (central), translated into pinyin as zhong, zhoong, chung, choong, jung and jõong. What does this mean?
介绍完了，我们再回到拼音的问题上来。恕我直言，如果一种语言在各地的拼写方式都不一样，这种语言还有什么用呢？我发现上海的拼音书写就不统一。我从澳大利亚带来的外语常用语手册更是公然冒天下之大不韪。比如，在中国最常见的一个“中” 字竟被拼成zhong, zhoong, chung, choong, jung 和 jõong。这说明什么呢？

What it seems to mean is that pinyin can be respelled by anyone, according to their individual sense of phonetics. Let me give you more examples. My phrasebook from Australia (by a market leader in such books, which surprised me somewhat) even spells its pinyin differently from section to section. For example, the aforementioned jung became jõong in another chapter, and also yi gir on one page mysteriously becomes "ee gir on another (it's yi and er on the 1 and 2 jiao notes, so why change it?). Water can become shui, shway or xúi (they're all pretty different, aren't they?). Island becomes either dao or tao, depending where you read it (as far as I know it's correctly dao, so why is Tsingdao spelt Tsingtao?) And lastly, I've seen thank you, as xie xie, ché ché, and even syàir syàir. Surely this renders Chinese to English dictionaries laborious to the point of almost useless, because you never know when to look under X or S, D or T, or C or Z. What a mess!
这意味着任何人都可以按照自己对语音的感觉对拼音进行重新拼写。可以通过更多的例子来证明这一点。我从澳大利亚带来的外语常用语手册甚至连每一章的拼音拼写都不一样（让我颇感意外的是这种书竟然出自一个在市场里做生意的老板之手）。比如说，前一章的jung到另一章就变成了jõong，前一页的yi gir出现在另一页时竟莫名其妙地变成了ee gir（页脚上的1和2明明拼做yi 和er，为什么还要变来变去呢？）“水”可以拼做shui，shway甚至是xúi （而它们明显大不一样）。“岛”可以拼做dao或tao，究竟怎么拼要看这个字出现在哪儿。据我所知，正确的拼法应该是dao, 那么为什么还要把Tsingdao 拼写成Tsingtao呢？我还看到“谢谢” 这个词被拼成xie xie, ché ché甚至是syàir syàir。这种拼写不统一的状况无疑给汉英词典的翻译工作带来极大困难，几乎使这项工作失去意义，因为你无法知道什么时候应该在哪个词条下查一个词，X 还是 S, D 还是 T, 是C 还是 Z。真是一团糟！

The conclusion I've reached from seeing Shanghai is that her pinyin is being worked to be as absolutely phonetic as possible (for example, changing the "x's" into "sh's" and "zh's" into "ch's") because of the tourist factor - the bulk of Wuhan has yet to feel the necessity. But my point, if I have one, is this - is it better to make things easier for a tourist who'll be there for a week, while confusing someone who's been in China for a while and is slowly finding his or her linguistic feet? (I even became momentarily lost in Shanghai because one map had a zhong where it should have had a chang, which can make a universe of difference). I guess from an economic point of view, the answer might be yes, but from a social and cultural point of view, I'm not too sure.
通过观察上海的情况我得出的结论是，上海开始为游客着想，正在努力规范拼音的书写，使其尽量符合语音学的标准。例如，把"x's" 改成 "sh's"，把 "zh's" 改成 "ch's"。然而，大多数武汉人还没有认识到这种做法的必要性。如果我能发表自己看法的话，依我看，为那些打算在中国逗留一周的游客提供较多的便利不是很好吗，何必非得让那些老外在中国住了一段时间还是充满困惑，最后得靠自己慢慢悟出语言上的门道？（我也有在上海短时间内走丢的时候，因为有张地图把本应拼做chang的字误拼成了zhong，结果就完全不一样了。）从实用的角度讲，我认为应该对拼音进行规范。但从社会和文化的角度讲，我又不是很肯定了。

Excuse my naivety here, and I guess this article might annoy some people who are more knowledgeable than me about this subject (for instance, I've heard pinyin changes from province to province), but where are there rules with pinyin? Where are the standards? Can literally anyone respell it, because it sounds more like a chung than a choong in their accent? Surely it could be argued that such inconsistencies render a language less than useful - an analogy might be someone picking up an English dictionary and randomly changing spellings throughout, just because he or she felt like it. That dictionary is now of less value, simply because of the subjectivity factor. Language needs some rules, and pinyin seems, to an outsider like me, rather a melting pot, and a bit of a free-for-all.
请原谅我的愚昧无知，我猜这篇文章可能会让某些在这个研究领域更有学问的人士大为恼火。（我曾听说各个省所使用的拼音都不一样。）但是拼音拼写的规则和标准又在哪里呢？难道只是因为一个本应读choong的词在一种方言中听起来更像chung人们就可以按照他们的口音随意进行重拼吗？拼写的不一致无疑会降低语言的实用性，以此类推，任何人都可以捡起本英语词典想当然的随意改变单词的拼写。人为的主观臆断大大降低了词典的价值。语言需要用一些规则来规范。在我这样一个局外人看来，拼音现在已经不仅仅是个兼容并蓄的大熔炉，而变成了一场任何人都可以参加的自由辩论。

I'll leave you with the thought I had while negotiating my way around Shanghai, and it's this--just give me some Chinese characters…please!
请让我在文章的最后告诉你当我在上海苦苦寻找道路时产生的真实想法——还是请多标注些汉字吧。

作者介绍：
Ashley Brown，来自澳大利亚的一名编辑兼音乐记者，现在中国任教。
     
Links：
1. Mind one's P's and Q's: be careful and polite about what one says or does.即注意自己的言行。
例如：She told her son to mind his p's and q's at the banquet，即她叫儿子在宴会上要循规蹈矩。
2. take on：begin to have ( a particular quality, appearance, etc), 呈现（某种性质、样子等），例如：Her eyes took on a hurt expression. 她的眼里流露出受委屈的神情。
3. free-for-all：n. A disorderly fight, argument, or competition in which everyone present takes part.可自由参加的争论，比赛；每一位出席者都可参加的混乱的打斗、争论或竞赛。