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Comment by United857 | Hacker News Reader

I can see the thinking behind the move -- embracing their identity -- but the thing with pinyin is that's not always intuitive for English speakers who've not learned it explicitly.

For instance, take the common New Year greeting 恭喜發財, romanized in pinyin as "Gong Xi Fa Cai". "Xi" in pinyin is pronounced somewhat like "she" in English, but someone who doesn't know will intuitively try to say "eks-ee" or "eks-eye" which is incomprehensible to a native Chinese. Likewise, "Cai" is like "tz" + "eye", but someone might try to say "Kai" as in the pronunciation of "Cairo".

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Taiwan used to have an official Romanization system called MPSII. I wish they pushed it harder because it's a lot easier for non-Mandarin-speakers to get right.

• "Gong Xi Fa Cai" becomes "Gung Shi Fa Tsai"

• "Xiaomi" becomes "Shiau-mi"

• "Jiu" (pronounced like "Joe") becomes "Jiou"

• "Qu" (pronounced like "chew") becomes "Chu"

What...! This would have saved me so much pain trying to learn basic phrases a while ago. Looks like there is a converter, which is cool for next time:

https://www.gonnalearn.com/chinese/converter.html

Edit: Hmm, it didn't work when I tried it. Not sure if I chose the right source type.

That sounds brilliant for signage, but Pinyin is shorter and this better for digital input methods.

I'd like to think that there are better #1 priorities for a writing system than "as short as possible".

"Be as close to English pronunciation as possible"?

That works if your target audience is English speakers. However, the main consumer of pinyin is Chinese in China, where it's ubiquitous for glossing the readings of Chinese characters, either because some people can't read them, because some characters are obscure, or just for stylistic reasons.

Some thoughts on the topic: https://driftingclouds.net/2018/07/17/from-siberia-to-tibet-...

Most Taiwanese use bopomofo* for digital input, so it's not an issue :)

* https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Keyboard_layout_Zhuy...

As an aside, I know primary input methods are not built for foreigners, but it's getting hard to keep all of the input methods in my head. With Japanese at least it's really easy to just do dvorak -> romaji -> [conversion]; but when I have to type russian, I have to switch gears completely, since there is no relation between english and russian keymaps (even in terms of theory of operation, with alternating hands for isolated vowels and consonants). I guess I had to type more Chinese, I guess I could justify it better.

My (mainland) experience is that on cell phones younger people tend to use pinyin base keyboard input while older people tend to use character recognition software

For digital methods, a romanization-agnostic system called shuangpin is pretty optimal.

pinyin is not romanization, it is a pronunciation system used to mark how character should be pronounced correctly. The objective is to have the 'correct' pronunciation, not to make it easier for westerner's to mimic the sound (which is actually the objective of romanization). I don't think we should compare these two systems.

I always wondered why Romanization was done the way it was. Someone had the unprecedented opportunity to build a system from whole cloth where everything was pronounced just like it sounded, and completely fucked it up.

Only if you expect it to look like English spelling specifically?

If the benchmark instead is other European languages, pinyin seems reasonable. The mapping of Q is probably the most unexpected feature.

The goal of Pinyin was to be a pronunciation guide for Chinese people who have no preconceived ideas about what letters make what sounds. It works great for that. The problem is when foreigners try to pronounce Pinyin using their existing knowledge of the Latin alphabet. Inevitably they end up pronouncing "Xiaomi" as "Jow-me", etc!

I think this isn't giving Pinyin enough credit.

The biggest problem with English pronunciation, and the biggest reason everyone says English spelling is a mess, is the Great Vowel Shift: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

So when you're writing a sound in the Latin alphabet, you have two choices:

- spell it like English (the only language with spelling so confusing, spelling bees are a thing)

- or spell it like every other language (relatively consistent)

Pinyin... chose to be consistent, like every other language.

A lot of the other weirdness is based on other languages, too: for instance, "x" is pronounced "sh" is Portuguese as well.

I'm not saying saying use English vowels or anything like that, I just mean they could have used the letters in more standard ways like MPSII does.

By what "standard". Many pinyin pronunciations are close to standard for many European languages expect English. On top of that Mandarin has multiple similar sounds (in pinyin presented as "x", "sh", "j" and "q") that would force you to get a little more creative.

My understanding is Pinyin was created to improve literacy rates within China, not as a bridge to western languages.

I assume the parent is referring to the fact that letters are pronounced differently depending on the context. That said, unless the parent is a native speaker of spanish or esperanto, that doesn't seem like much of a problem. It's at least more consistent than english.

It's impossible to make a system like you're suggesting. When people try to create a "romanized" spelling of the words in their language, they almost always run into the problem of sounds that aren't part of the alphabet. To make it work, you have to do something like add accent marks, or create some special letter combinations.

There are several different Romanizations of Chinese and each one had different priorities.

The problem is that...English does not have all the phonemes from other languages, Romanization will never give you the complete correct pronunciation. As foreigner, you basically lost not only the way to pronounce alien phonemes, also lost the ability to hear it. You will map it to the closet phoneme in your own language, and think they are the same anyway.

> "Jiu" (pronounced like "Joe")

Pronounced like "Jyoe", maybe. "Joe" would be the syllable "zhou".

Relying on better pronunciation of non-Chinese speakers as a form of romanization for Chinese speakers is not a good idea.

Does anyone remember when Beijing was Peking?

And I don't think Taiwan had an official romanization system, Wade giles seems more prevalent, and the road signs now are still a laughable mess.

Maybe not a good idea in general, but it seems perfectly reasonable for naming your restaurant.

>And I don't think Taiwan had an official romanization system

They had a few but never used any of them consistently, hence the mess.

Actually, Bei = Pe, in another form of romanization. "B" in Hanyu Pinyin is an unaspirated "p". In addition, "j" was indeed a "k"-like sound in the past. Mandarin Chinese underwent a linguistic process called palatalization, which softens "k"-like sounds; the same process has Italian pronounce "k" sounds as "tch", and, to a further extreme, has English and French pronounce them as "s".

Peking, the spelling, 'Pe', well 'Pek' with a glottal stop on the 'k' comes from Cantonese from over a century ago.

>Does anyone remember when Beijing was Peking?

The name Peking came from Cantonese.

This is similar to HK, Cantonese had a similar Romanization system as well, makes things trillion times easier for English Speaker to pronounce it.

No idea where did the Chinese Pinyin came from.

That take forever to summarize. How about learn PinYin from the basic?

I just found this video on YouTube, can be a good start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XbQJPF817I&list=PLWXyZU_NJb...

I think it’s more than embracing identity but also moving away from the bland greasy spoon cheap fare type and moving to more sophisticated and upscale variety.

The compromise is to have Chinese characters reflecting one name and an unrelated and disconnected English name to appeal to both audiences.

Something like:

異國風味蔬食

Vegan Chinese.

恭喜发财 (Gong Xi Fa Cai) was never a common greeting phrase in Mandarin speaking regions. It was more commonly used in Cantonese (thus it was more commonly written as Gong Hey Fat Choi).

In Mandarin speaking regions of China it's common to say 恭贺新禧 or 新春愉快 or simply 新年好.

In proper Mandarin pronunciation, "Xi" sounds more like the second syllable of "missy" not "she".

I don't know if you pronounce "missy" differently than I do, but I pronounced the second syllable "see".

And to me, Mandarin 'xi' sounds a lot more like "she" than "see".

You might not differentiate too well with "shi" and "si" pinyin in mandarin if you are not a native speaker. Or maybe you pronounce "she" differently. There shouldn't be a "sh" sound in "xi".

I'm a native speaker; my first language was Mandarin.

On the other hand, I'm a Southerner, so I don't usually distinguish between "sh" and "s" sounds. I can do the 卷舌 thing, though, well enough that Northerners tell me I'm doing it right, and I don't think either Pinyin "shi" or Pinyin "si" sound anything like English "she". And while I don't think Pinyin "xi" sounds exactly like English "she", I think it sounds pretty close.

... in the vernacular. Proper pronunciation is more like “she”.

This is an issue lost on most native speakers of mandarin, and it’s hard as hell to teach to learners.

pinyin —> proper sound —-> actual sound

xi —> she —> see

si —> suh —> suh

shi —> shuh —> suh

chi —> chuh —> tsuh

ci —> tsuh —> tsuh

There are more, but I’m too many beers in now to remember.

The best test is to ask someone how to say 四十四是四十四 (44 is 44). It’s a good test for tones. This is properly something like /shuh suh shuh shuh shuh suh shuh/. In vernacular, this usually becomes something like /suh suh suh suh suh suh suh/ with tones being the only hint at different words.

Chinese is fun.

In standard Beijing Mandarin pronunciation? If you have a dialect then you might have stronger "sh" sound when trying to pronounce "si" "ci" "zi" "xi", so it's hard do differentiate between "si" and "shi", "ci" and "chi" or "zi" and "zhi". 四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十。

I humbly suggest that Beijing Mandarin pronunciation is not “standard” putonghua — otherwise, mostly of these sounds would end with a retroflex /r/.

I forget the details now, but “standard” putonghua has two variants, and each variant revolves around Jiangsu province (something like north and south?). Anyway, Beijing people think that they speak the “standard”. People educated in linguistics know better.

I beg to differ. Read here: "Its pronunciation is based on the Beijing dialect, its vocabulary on the Mandarin dialects, and its grammar is based on written vernacular Chinese."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese

No, just give up trying to find that sound in English, it basically does not exist. Apparently Cantonese is a lot easier for English speaker to learn, they don't have these special phonemes.

As a native Chinese, I can say with confidence that Xi sounds closer to "she" than "see".

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