I want to ask ,which spelling is correct ,Sung or Song dynasty in 960-1279 ?

I see this article spelling as Sung Dynasty

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/CHEMPIRE/SUNG.HTM

http://www.historyforkids.org/learn/china/history/sung.htm

Song would be correct if you are following pinyin convention. [I grew up writing "Sung" myself and have not really warmed to pinyin even now.]

Sung was the wade giles romanization that is no longer used in China today. It only appeared in some older western texts on chinese history.

The proper standard romanization should be "Song" which is based on pinyin. Pinyin has already been held as the standard chinese romanization today. Even Taiwan is going to change to hanyu pinyin next year.

The correct tonal spelling in pinyin for 宋 is Sòng, using the fourth tone (the "down" tone as I like to call it). Wade Giles spelling of "Sung" is primitive and worthless and should be thrown into the trashbin of history.

Eric

Could you kindly justify such a vehement accusation here?

What is the model of progress that we are suppose to accept here with respect to pinyin ... and what is the "trashbin of history"?

Cheers, Richard

Because, quite honestly, I CAN'T STAND Wade-Giles spelling format. It's does not reflect correct pronunciation; in this regard, Hanyu pinyin is lightyears ahead. Wade-Giles does not even accomodate tonal variation. It looks sloppy and mismanaged with so many extra "h"s which quite frankly are inserted where they don't make sense in regards to pronunciation. When Hanyu pinyin more correctly uses "j" for something like Jīn Cháo 金朝, Wade Giles uses "ch"! Which looks like Chin Ch'ao. This is misleading to most English readers who will pronounce "ch" like "chair" and thus will not pronounce 金 correctly.

On tones, Wade marks them too, look up any old dictionary... As for the pronounciation, this is probably the worst argument in favour of pinyin... Yeah, perhaps Jin is better than Chin, but just compare, or, rather, ask a non initiated english speaker.

Qing and Ch'ing
Yan and Yen
Jian and Chien
KangXi and K'angHsi
Qianlong and Ch'ien lung

We could actually be systematic, since there are few phonemes in chinese, and get a statistics, I am pretty certain Wade (or any other english romanisation) would win hands down...

As I said previously, the only argument in favour of pinyin as an international standard is that it is a standard. Whether this is good or bad depends on whether one likes standards or not. Personally, if I ever go translating chinese seriously, I'll most certainly use Wade or EFEO as my romanisation scheme: I prefer translated chinese names to be readable by my readers than to be "standard" for the sake of standardness.

Btw, most translators do exactly this when they translate foreign names. Pick any russian novel... each language romanises it in its own way. As a friend of mine, a published chinese poet and translator (from french and german) used to say: the reader comes first...

But of course, I do use pinyin on CHF, can read it, and hated EFEO and Wade the first time I was confronted with them. But I still consider that "Mahomet must come to the mountain, and not the mountain to Mahomet", scholars of chinese should make the (very small) effort of learning romanisations...

Francois

I'd say Sung/Song, Ping/Bing, and Jen/Ren are extreme examples where Wade-Giles is clearly not as good at rendering a sound. In many other cases, Hanyu Pinyin just trades one set of confusing approximations for another. Francois has already pointed out the difficulties the average English-speaker has with the 'q' and 'x' sounds; to that I'd add that 'zun' is not better than 'tsun' and is perhaps inferior, and 'si' is not much better than 'ssu' in rendering a sound that is simply not represented in the vowels of the alphabet.

Even Jin/Chin doesn't tell us anything, since most people would pronounce the 'j' like 'juice' or 'jell-o', rather than the soft, sharp way it is pronounced in Putonghua.

I recently heard Americans in Berkeley trying to pronounce the name of the director Jia Zhangke. It came out totally off, and it seems to me their pronunciation would be a lot closer if the name were romanized as 'Dzia Jangke'.

But then, there's the matter of aesthetic, and personally Pinyin "looks" the most Chinese to me (probably because I taught the system to myself at a young age so that it's just natural to me), but then you can argue it's only a matter of my own tastes and perceptions, and not so much one of "rightness", though I do find lots of examples that just bug me now--ie Chao/Zhao, Chang/Zhang, Jin/Chin, Ssu/Si, and Jen/Ren. With training however, I read these naturally now too. Pinyin's just preference, and I do like standards.

Nice helpful replies - thanks. I agree with François that it would help most people to learn more about the different forms of transcriptions of Chinese particularly if they have an interest in studying earlier scholarly writings on the culture and history of China. This pertains esp. to the Legge and Wade Giles systems without which the older but often still authoritative early western sinological works would be very difficult of access to a modern reader. [I assume same would be true for someone who only understands pinyin who then tries to decipher EFEO transcriptions in French texts.]

Whether pinyin looks more "Chinese" than other systems probably depends on personal taste and the unique circumstances of one's own exposure to it. To me personally it will always have the taint of being at once "Communist" (I am actually not against Communism per se as a political ideology but you have to see it in the context of a post-Cultural Revolution situation in which the mainland has turned against everything that is "traditional" or "traditionally Chinese") and "northern" since I grew up in HK and it's only the mandarin-speaking mainlanders who were using it then. It's not very rational but I adduce this background as the reason why I still have a hard time warming to pinyin even though I understand some of the utility arguments behind using it as the basis for standardisation.

One might say that I must have had a "colonial mentality" since I do not really seem to object as much to the British-invented Wade system but that system at least has the merit (in my view) of not being centrally directed by powerful state authority with a drive to standardisation/centralisation. In contrast, pinyin comes across to me as a form of imposition by mainland mandarin-speakers on all the other Chinese whereas the other systems seem less directly pegged to just one dialect/political regime.

At one level this question becomes deeply personal when you bring the transcription of family names into the equation. Should we all standardise to the mightly pinyin convention? Lim to Lin might seem like a small shift (it won't be so to me at least) even though it would serve to eliminate the Swatownese ethno-linguistic identity that lies behind Lim but what about all the Tsangs and Changs of the world? Surely all this is a conspiracy by the powerful Z-letter lobby!

Cheers, Richard

Actually, if I were to recommend a system for western students of chinese, it would probably be one like the Gwoyeu Romatzyh, which uses different spellings (instead of accents or numbers) for different tones. Tones are generally the weak point of most non native students of chinese, noting them as different spellings would probably help learning them. Pronounciation-wise, I would say it is a little better than pinyin (even though the tonal spellings make it look weird at first glance)

And it has a distinct (and genuine) chinese feeling to it...

Francois

While I use pinyin exclusively, I would like just point out one thing in the debate of choice of romanisation standards - pinyin is applicable 100% only to modern Mandarin.

For historical characters, whether you use pinyin or Wades or whatever, there's a good chance you may not get the pronounciation right in the way that they themselves would understand.

Language is ever evolving.

I've never seen an example of Wade Giles using tonal marks, and I don't own old dictionaries, so I'll have to give you the benefit of the doubt.

And fair enough, there are disadvantages to both, but I still stand firm that Pinyin is more practical.



Exactly!



That's a good suggestion, "d" and "z" together would make a ligther and sharper "j". I didn't say pinyin was perfect, but I still think it is better than Wade-Giles!



Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow. Don't get me wrong Richard Lim, I love their creation of Hanyu Pinyin, but I do not cheerlead for the mainland on most things. Take for example their creation of Simplified characters, which creates a headache for people like me. I'm trying to learn both systems since I HAVE TO learn Traditional if I'm seriously considering using old primary sources as a professor and historian later in life. I think their creation of Simplified characters was rather polemic and they don't look as nice and refined as their Traditional variants. This is besides the fact that Simplified characters lose the meaning of their original construction by omitting certain strokes or elements.

Well, I can guarantee you that average Americans would pronounce 'Zhao' or 'Zhang' with the soft 'j' sound of French, and not the hard 'j' sound of 'juice' or 'jell-o'. And that would be just as wrong as pronouncing them as 'Chao' or 'Chang'. So why not spell them as 'Jao' and 'Jang'? For that matter, why 'Jiang' and 'Jie' rather than 'Dziang' and 'Dzieh'? How could the 'j' be pronounced one way for 'ji' and another way for 'ju', and why do the first consonant in 'ju' and 'zh-' begin differently when they sound the same? [Yes, I know I've ranted about the inconsistencies of the letter 'j' before...]



Very true. Han and Tang people did not speak Mandarin/Putonghua, a fact that tends to elude even Chinese citizens who grew up watching historical serials in very correct Beijing speech. The same illusion may be seen in English-speakers unaware that their pronunciation of Greek and Roman names differs greatly from Attic Greek and Classical Latin.

So the Pinyin vs. Wade-Giles debate is of very marginal historiographical value, and is really of more interest to linguists. The only reason why non-Chinese historians ever have to bother about it is because most of the younger ones have adopted Hanyu Pinyin, mostly as a result of being taught by PRC-trained teachers, and those who haven't thus feel compelled to explain themselves. Hence we have the following passage by David Curtis Wright, for example, in the Acknowledgements section of his recent From War to Diplomatic Parity in Eleventh-century China: Sung's Foreign Relations with Kitan Liao (Leiden: Brill, 2005):

"I thank Kelly DeVries and Brill for allowing me to publish in the Wade-Giles romanisation I greatly prefer over the newer Pinyin system. I submit that Chang Hsueh-ch'in in Wade-Giles is no less monstrous and obscure than Zhang Xueqin is in Pinyin, and I remain unconvinced that all China scholars should adopt Pinyin simply because it is now the preferred romanisation syste of the ruling authorities on mainland China. Additionally, I note with interest Christopher Beckwith's observation that Wade-Giles is "the only English language transcription system that correctly represents the phonetic values of the initial stop consonants in modern Mandarin Chinese (which lacks voiced stops).""

I'm not sure 'polemic' is the right word. The primary objective for the simplification was to make basic literacy easier to achieve, and thereby to raise the literacy rate to the extent that the majority of farmers would be able to read and write. And the literacy rate in the PRC is now at least 90%. In that sense, the simplification has made great contributions to Chinese society.

But at the same time, one could make a good case that the simplification could have been done more systematically, and various irregularities and inconsistencies could have been avoided. I would make exactly the same argument about Hanyu Pinyin.