Talk:Pinyin/Archive 1

old comments
I accept the general application of pinyin romanization, and I appreciate the alternative numerical way of interpreting tonalities. Still it seems to me that it would be more appropriate to show the tone numbers as superscripts. Thus we would have "pin1" instead of "pin1" Comments? Eclecticology


 * No objection except several considerations. 1. superscripts are harder to type. 2. superscripts may make the pin yin unsearchable. e.g. it is easier to search "pin1 yin1" than the alternative.  The in-line notation has been widely accepted in plain text medium before markup languages were widely used.
 * Also, it appears that IE for Windows does not support superscripts. I had to switch to using Mozilla Firefox to read the superscripts in the tables in this article. --DV 19:06, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)

The pronunciation guide seems to confuse "unaspirated" with "voiced", for example in saying that z represents unaspirated c. Can someone who knows mandarin confirm this?


 * I don't actually know Mandarin, but the description in the text accords everything I've heard about it, and with the Pinyin <-> IPA pronunciation guide in the back of my Chinese-English dictionary: z = [ts]  c = [ts']    So far as I am aware, Mandarin consonants have no voiced/unvoiced distinctions. --Brion 06:22 Dec 3, 2002 (UTC)


 * I speak a fair bit of Mandarin, and the description sounds right to me -- prat

I can't read any of the pinyin? Why? Vera Cruz


 * Are you using Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows? Try one of the items from the View/Encoding/More/Chinese* (Traditional or Simplified) menu.  This should prompt you to install a language pack.  Alternatively, you can download the fonts directly from Microsoft.  If you are using a different Web browser or Operating System, you may need to install fonts manually.  You need a Unicode Font with the Chinese code pages.


 * I tried your suggestion of installing the Chinese language pack from the Microsoft web site, but this only allows the Chinese characters for the word "Pinyin" to show up, near the top of the article. There are still boxes in the rest of the article for various missing characters.
 * In the main article, it says IE on Windows won't work because of a technical limitation, and refers the reader to an article on web browsers. Unfortunately, that article doesn't say which web browser fixes this problem.
 * Given that 93% of browsers are IE (according to the Wikipedia article on this subject), I would be surprised if there really isn't a fix for this problem? --DV 16:05, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Virtually all browsers except IE will fix the problem. I am the one who added the notice about technical limitations to the article.  Unfortunately, if I had suggested you dump IE and always use Firefox instead, a quarrel would have started, so I was neutral.  But right here on this talk page, I can come right out and tell you that you should download, install and use this browser: Mozilla Firefox.  Chameleon 16:28, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the quick reply! This is an important piece of information that should appear in a FAQ, but I can see your point about it being difficult to point this out in a neutral manner without offending IE partisans. I will go and install Firefox per your recommendation, and if it works, I will not hesitate to pass along your recommendation to other Chinese language readers. --DV 17:39, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * After installing Firefox, it appears that the missing characters were superscripts, so this was not an issue with Chinese characters. Thanks for the assistance, Chameleon. --DV 19:04, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Just to clarify. The display problem is on the IPA symbols, not related to pinyin at all.  So the suggestion to install the Chinese language pack does not address the real issue here. Kowloonese 22:24, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

-

Removed this section about using pinyin sounds being on the right track. The paragraph doesn't sound encyclopedic, and it's somewhat misleading. Especially without tones, a person who just pronounced pinyin to English pronounciations would by mostly incomprehsible.

Capitalization
A question: Should we use "Pinyin" or "pinyin" (i.e. capitalize the first letter or not)? I have always thought "Pinyin" was the correct spelling, as it's a name of a Romanization system, but now that I see most people seem to write "pinyin" I'm not so certain anymore.

- Wintran 11:31 Feb 21, 2003 (UTC)


 * I second the lowercase idea. I've always used 'pinyin', and it's not a proper noun as far as I can ascertain! -- prat


 * Merriam-Wesbter accepts both, OED lists it as uppercase and offers no explanation.
 * The name can be considered as:
 * Abbreviation of the document = uppercase.
 * A common method = lowercase, but in this case, it can literally can hence theoretically refers to all alphabet spelling systems, Latin or Cyrillic.
 * --Menchi 00:32 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I recommend capping "pinyin" when standing alone only when it's used as a short form for Hanyu Pinyin (note the capping of both H and P). Because the article also discusses the Tongyong Pinyin system, it's especially important to observe the distinction.

Thus, in the following, pinyin should be capped: Proponents for adopting pinyin maintained that it is a international standard that is already used throughout the world.

And in this example it is already in lower case, as it should be, because the reference is to romanization in general not to Hanyu Pinyin specifically: As of 2003, no form of pinyin is used in elementary education on Taiwan to teach pronunciation. Taibeiren 02:50, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * Sounds good to me. It's logical. --Menchi 02:53, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

-

Tone mark or number
So the numbers correspond to the tones otherwise indicated by diacritical marks? -- User:Smack, 00:26 2003-6-20


 * Yes, # are easy to type, diacritics ain't so. I can only type à and á have must copy-and-paste the other two. --Menchi 00:28 20 Jun 2003 (UTC)

ar?
ar: IPA [a&#633;], like a, but pronounced with the tongue curled up against the palate; like rhotic are in North American English

So far as I know, there is no such vowel "ar" in pinyin, maybe you mean "&#20799;&#21270;&#38899;", but that's quite "Beijing" or, say, northern, people in the south don't use that. In fact, 'r' here is short for 'er'(a-er--> ar), like "&#30422;&#20799;"(gai-er can be written like "gair"), but 'ar' can't be count as an independent vowel. Otherwise, 'ir', 'ür' etc. should be list too. --ILovEJPPitoC 10:14, 9 Oct 2003 (UTC)

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umlaut vs. diaeresis
Text reads A dieresis or an umlaut is occasionally used over the vowel u. Actually, Hanyu Pinyin does not use the diaeresis, only the umlaut. Although the two look the same, their function is different -- thus the two different words. -- Taibeiren 03:08, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Suggested change (minor)
Under "Rules given in terms of English pronunciation", change:

i: IPA [i], like English "ee", except when preceded by "c", "ch", "r", "s", "z" or "zh"...

to

i: IPA [i], like English "ee", except when preceded by "c", "ch", "r", "s", "sh", "z" or "zh"...

This suggestion is based purely on observation of actual usage. For example, pinyin for &#36866; as in &#21512;&#36866; is "shi".

I'm hesitant to make the change without some input since I'm a new user to Wikipedia & also new to pinyin. However, I'm a native Mandarin speaker, know the actual pronunciation of words & just trying understand pinyin better primarily for word-processing purposes. --Anon


 * Done. Next time just change it yourself. ;) -- ran 05:00, Jun 8, 2004 (UTC)


 * Yes, be bold! --Menchi 05:02, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Sinosplice pronounciations
I added a link to sinosplice's page on pronounciation of Mandarin Chinese. This is the best site I've found for pronounciation of pinyin. Note, for instance, the charts on page 3 "Phonetics". This may be overkill for casual readers, who just want to know that "x" sounds like "sh" and "q" like "ch", but might you include some more thorough (and accurate) information for enthusiasts who really want to get it right? --Ethan

Typo or something I don't understand?
Why is there a middle dot character before the (ma) in the 5th tone in the example?


 * It indicates a partial stop. --Taoster 19:04, 12 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Simplified Chinese Input Device (for creating Pinyin)
For other Wikipedia contributors who need to create Pinyin romanizations of printed Chinese literature (especially proper nouns that usually don't appear in electronic translators), I have started working with the PenPower Chinese Handwriting Recognition System.

My initial experience with this device can be found on my user page.

If anyone has any questions about the PenPower device, please feel free to post either on this talk page, or over on my user talk page. So far, the out-of-the-box experience for this device has been excellent, but I'll post again later, after I see how it holds up to everyday use, to let you know if I highly recommend it or not. --DV 10:17, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)

hei
I looked up http://www.zhongwen.com and found that thre is only one Chinese character with the pinyin of "hei". Is the dictionary incomplete? Chinese is infamous of many homonyms, so this one sound is very special when there is only one character. Anyone know of more examples of unique sounds in pinyin? Kowloonese 02:52, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Yes, zhongwen.com is certainly far from complete. In some dictionaries you'll find a second character pronounced "hei1", which is an interjection particle (along the lines of hey!), but that's about it.  Many characters whose pronunciation ends in -ei in Mandarin (e.g. "gei3", "dei3") are irregular forms, i.e., these pronunciations are somewhat surprising in light of cognates in other dialects.  There are plenty of other phonetic forms that only occur as the pronunciation of a small number of characters (e.g. "ma1", "liu1", which are all unusual, given what is known about the historical development of Mandarin), and there are hypothetical forms that don't occur at all for similar reasons (e.g. "dong2").  On the other hand, some forms like "ji4" are highly ambiguous, partly because there is a large variety of historical forms that correspond to modern Mandarin "ji4". --MarkSweep 04:37, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the pointers to some of the other rare sound in Mandarin. I looked up other characters with the "hei" sound in the UniHan database . Since the Unicode database attempts to collect most known Han characters, I assume its collection is most likely more complete than most dictionaries.  I also looked up other sound like ma, liu etc.  Though ma1 and liu1 does not have many Chinese characters, the other tones such as ma2, ma3, ma4, liu2,liu3 and liu4 are quite abundent.  &#22079; and &#28534; are based on &#40657; by adding a mouth radical to make a phonetic for the interjection and the water radical to make it the name of a river &#28534;&#27700;(&#21476;&#38605;&#24030;&#22659;&#20839;&#30340;&#27827;&#27969;&#21517;&#31281;) etc.  They look more like modern made-up characters than traditional Chinese.


 * Right, &#22079; is the interjection I was referring to above. I'm not sure that the Unicode database is "more complete than most dictionaries", since Unicode "Han unification" purposely glosses over a number of variants that some large character dictionaries (e.g. the &#28450;&#35486;&#22823;&#23383;&#20856;) will list as distinct lemmas. The issue here is how to individuate characters, and Unicode has one set of criteria that are not necessarily shared by some dictionaries, and so you get discrepancies. --MarkSweep 23:01, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * That is true. Ancient printed dictionaries should have a bigger collection assuming many uncommon characters are dropped by the computerization.  However, my statement will still be valid if I change it to say on-line dictionaries.  Kowloonese 21:02, 10 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * I also looked up -ei sound in the UniHan database, there are plently of Characters such as mei, lei etc. that matched. However, you are quite right that gei is rarer than hei.  Though it is probably insignificant, it is an interesting trivia to point out that hei and gei has the least homonym in Mandarin pinyin.  Kowloonese 21:56, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Off the top of my head, I seem to recall that gei3 is an irregular reading of &#32102;, while the alterantive reading of &#32102;, ji3, is the expected result of regular sound change. You might want to double check that, though. --MarkSweep 23:01, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * I think eh (&#35474;) is unique. --Menchi 05:59, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * &#27448; and &#35474; both pronounced as ei according to the Unicode database. It falls in the same rare group as hei and gei. Kowloonese 22:12, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Another example that outlines the relative obscurity of characters with final -ei is cei4, which occurs most prominently in the Beijing regionalect. Its meaning is to inadverdantly smash into pieces, as in &#25684;&#30862;, but it is usually not included in most dictionaries nor is it found in the Microsoft Chinese IME. The character is often erroneously thought of as an alternate reading of sui4, but this is illogical as sui4 is not used as a verb unless joined with another character. -Taoster 22:35, 21 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Order of explanation
It seems to me that an alphabetic sequence of the explanation is not the most informative. I would prefer to cluster in vowels and in consonant groups as shown by the colors in the IPA chart.Woodstone 21:28, 2004 Dec 14 (UTC)

Controversy
My comment (and direction of possible edit):


 * Pinyin does not permit the average layman to correctly pronounce even the Beijing speech; on the other hand, since there are so many homonyms, pinyin breaks the link between the written character and its meaning. Since pinyin fails to preserve either sound or meaning, what good is it? Pinyin is merely a last resort when Chinese must be represented by a computer system that can only display plain text. Most systems that can display accents with diacriticals can display hanzi characters as well. (However, I admit there are bugs in two-byte implementation and pinyin is a convenient shortcut.) Pinyin is most useful when the reader already knows what is being said.

I don't want to start a fight, but I do think the severe limitations of any system of Romanization need to be brought out. The novice reader will need quite a lot of background in order to perceive the extent of the problem and I don't think it is appropriate for me to stuff all that into this (pinyin) article. I'm considering a new article, tentatively titled Chinese and English compared, in which the structural differences between the languages are developed, with extensive cross-references to existing articles on both language families. It is my position that these differences and the nature of the Chinese languages invalidate pinyin.

I solicit comment on both the new article and the edit I plan to make to this section of this (pinyin) article. I have plenty of ideas and I'm not really asking for anyone to do the work, but this is the time to speak up and tell me what not to do. Xiong 16:25, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)


 * But pinyin today is used only to:
 * Teach people how to read
 * Organize dictionaries
 * Input characters (since most people don't learn Wubi or Cangjie)
 * Transcribe Chinese into other languages
 * Moreover, pinyin accounts for all of the phonemes and tonemes of Standard Mandarin (Putonghua). If you know it, you can pronounce Standard Mandarin.
 * So I don't really see what you're getting at or what points you're trying to make. Can you elaborate a bit? -- ran (talk) 16:41, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * I believe this is about some comment that Chinese language can do without Chinese characters. The language can be romanized using pinyin.  For example, Vietnamese language is romanized and they have rid of any reference to Chinese characters regardless of Chinese usage in their historical text.  Back in the 70s, I remembered walking into a Chinese book store and in a small corner I found stacks of books printed in romanized pinyin.  Only the book titles used a few Chinese characters, the rest of the books were void of any Chinese text, yet the books were written in Mandarin pinyin.  You can read it aloud to understand what it says (most of the time, except for ambiguous homonyms, you have to guess by judging from the context.) if you speak Mandarin.  Other than the overwhelming homonyms in Chinese language, the other issues is the percentage of native Mandarin speakers.  Even though Mandarin is the official Chinese language, but most Chinese people do not speak it as their first dialect.  A book written in romanized pinyin will look like Greek to people who speak Shanghainese or Cantonese or Minnan or .....  Kowloonese 19:59, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * Unfortunately, pinyin is used for other purposes, indeed used almost as if it were a langugage in itself. For instance, street signs in China are commonly written in pinyin (as well as characters) -- and, note well, without diacriticals. I feel it is a poor tool even for the purposes you've mentioned:
 * One learns nothing about how to read characters by studying pinyin.
 * Large number of homonyms mean that characters must still be ordered within a single pinyin "section" or page; plus, as a practical matter, the vast majority of Chinese people are not able to consistently identify the correct pinyin for a given character, hence they must fall back on the radical index anyway.
 * There is no really good system for character input and I admit I rely on pinyin myself when picking out characters on the keyboard. But anyone who has tried the system knows that -- again, due to homonyms -- up to a couple dozen characters may be offered for a given pinyin input. Pinyin gets you in the neighborhood and stops short.
 * Chinese cannot be transcribed into another language; I'm not even quite sure what you mean. If you mean "transliterated", pinyin fails, because the average American reader cannot correctly puzzle out the correct Chinese pronounciation. I agree it does a better job than, say, W-G, but only just.


 * My criticism is not of pinyin per se, but of Romanization in general. I feel Romanization is often used without an adequate understanding of its severe limitations. The entire Chinese approach to encoding meaning and sounds is so utterly different from the English (and related) approach that I feel Romanization is highly misleading. Pinyin, having eliminated most other forms of Romanization (for Chinese), bears the brunt of my ire.


 * The classic example is the Chinese capital, &#21271;&#20140;&#12290;For years, American news agencies referred to it as Peking, according to W-G; and although W-G specifies something like the correct pronounciation using these Roman letters, in practice nearly everyone called the place PEE-KING, ignoring the W-G system altogether. At some point (not sure when), it seemed that all the American newsies picked up on the pinyin form, Beijing. Of course, this is without tone marks, so doubly useless; and although when naively pronounced is closer (than Peking) to the way the city's own inhabitants do, it is still a ways off. In any case, there was a sort of urban legend running around at the time that the Chinese had actually changed the name of their city. Thus, Romanization promotes ignorance. I would much prefer that those who are unable or unwilling to speak or write Chinese simply translate it. The city ought be refered to by English speakers and writers as "North Capital" or perhaps "North Capital City". This is exact and accurate.


 * As I said, I don't want to start a fight over the issue; I'm aware that pinyin has gained great acceptance both within China and around the world. Mindful of NPOV, I don't want to push my view, but I think there are important issues which should be available to the interested reader. I would be grateful for suggestions on how to couch my points in non-confrontational, neutral language. Because pinyin has become so widespread, and so many Americans encounter it, it is important to disclose its weaknesses.


 * My gripe about pinyin is, to some extent, only a sidelight or gateway to the larger and much more complex topic of the comparison of Chinese and English. Some of this ground has been thoroughly covered in individual articles, but I think a direct comparison in simple terms would be of benefit. Again, I'll be grateful for stern warnings before I commit to a large project in this direction. Xiong 20:06, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)


 * The example of "Peking" vs. "Beijing" doesn't really illustrate your point. The W-G romanization is "Pei-ching", not "Peking". "Peking" is a historical and/or regional variant, closer to the modern Cantonese pronunciation. But notice that switching to pinyin hasn't really changed much: these days American newscasters still mispronounce "Beijing", pronouncing it as beige-ing for no good reason.  If the sole purpose of pinyin was to enable English speakers to pronounce Mandarin as well as possible, it might be better to romanize &#21271;&#20140; as "Bei-ching" (which would create other problems, because then how do you romanize &#24754;&#24773;?), but this would confuse French speakers. But the purpose of pinyin is not tied to any one foreign language; rather, it should primarily be an unambiguous representation of Mandarin phonology.  This said, any transformation that drops distinctions that could be made can be considered to be undesirable.  That includes conversion from &#27491;&#39636;&#23383; to &#31616;&#20307;&#23383;, since it collapses a number of homographs such as &#37324; and &#35041; (or &#35023;), but the situation is even worse for reduction to a purely phonological form such as li (pinyin or Wade-Giles) or &#12556;&#12583; (&#27880;&#38899;&#31526;&#34399;). In all cases you have lost information by the conversion, regardless of what the target representation is. The fact that pinyin is a phonological representation in terms of Latin characters is merely an accident. You could leverage the same criticism against any other romanization (e.g. Wade-Giles) or indigenous phonological representation (e.g. Bo-Po-Mo-Fo). The point is, you still have to know how a transliterated form relates to the phonology; if you want a direct phonological or phonetic representation, there is always IPA. --MarkSweep 21:27, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Okay, I thought Peking was W-G, but I'll accept the correction. Anyway, it sounds as if you agree with me -- is that correct? I'm certainly not advancing some other system over pinyin; I agree that they all have serious shortcomings. The only type of method for re-encoding an utterance (of which I approve) is lossless or nearly so; for example, IPA notation for a spoken word, or Unicode for a written character. Pinyin simply fails to preserve sufficient information. "Where's the beef?" Xiong 21:42, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)


 * It is true that pinyin fails to preserve the meaning of the words among many homonyms. However pinyin is a lossless phonetic representation.  There is only one precise way to read a pinyin notation, namely the pinyin way.  Of course, if you read pinyin as English it sounds different from Mandarin.  You get the same effect if you read French or Spanish as English too.  Same for Japanese notation, e.g. sake and karaoke are always read in English pronunciation even thought the romanized Japanese should only have one consistent pronunciation in Japanese.  If you stick to the pinyin standard, the notation is as lossless as IPA when only Mandarin is represented.  Kowloonese 22:16, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * I'll have to say I'm disagreeing with your point more than agreeing with it. As others have pointed out, pinyin is a faithful phonological representations. Of course it doesn't fulfill the same function as the written characters (being a representation of the phonology of one particular dialect), but is completely interchangeable with IPA (used for phonological transcription), Wade-Giles, Zhuyin fuhao, etc.  Unless you're using traditional characters, you don't get all the distinctions that are traditionally made in the written language.  But that's no reason to warn against pinyin.  Pinyin is extremely useful in a number of areas (as mentioned above); still, the radical plans from the 1950s to eventually replace traditional characters in the PRC entirely in favor of romanizations have thankfully been abandoned. The written language serves a very useful function that pinyin cannot hope to replace, but that doesn't mean that pinyin isn't useful for other purposes. --MarkSweep 22:54, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

While the paragraph above was being written I wrote this one, which agrees fully with it. I think you are all much too pessimistic about the quality of Pinyin. One should realise that Pinyin is not created for English speakers only, but for anyone more familiar with the Roman alphabet than with Chinese characters. There is a quite clear set of rules how to pronounce the letters (and combinations) in Pinyin. It is not difficult to learn. Then take a sentence transcribed including tone marks and read it aloud. I would guess that a native Mandarin speaker would be able to guess with at least 95% accuracy what is meant. The fact that Chinese has so many homonyms is a basic fact of any spoken Chinese and is not increased by using Pinyin. &minus;Woodstone 22:25, 2005 Mar 9 (UTC)


 * Even in daily conversation, Chinese often have to clarify which written word was used in a spoken sentence when ambiguity arrives due to homonyms. Such practice is used very often in telling one's name because names are not in commonly known context normally.  If you imagine the written Chinese is replaced by pinyin notation.  There will be confusion and ambiguity in every other sentence.  If one is trainned formally in pinyin, one's pronunciation is 100% accurate to any Mandarin listener because there is only one way to pronoun each pinyin spelling (unlike Egnlish).  I have known several Caucasian American friends who speak Mandarin more accurately than any Taiwanese people because they learned the pinyin pronounciation while the Taiwanese friends mix in Minnan accent into their speech.  For example, the Mandarin spoken by the current Taiwanese president is very hard to understand by people from Beijing.  Sometime I wondered if he was speaking Mandarin or not.  Kowloonese 22:42, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)


 * Well, if you indicated pauses and light tones properly, then someone with no deeper knowledge of Mandarin would presumably be understood, even if he only knew about Mandarin phonology and how pinyin relates to the phonology. This is essentially how spoken output by computers is done. --MarkSweep 22:54, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Okay, I agree there is another side to the debate, and that mine is the minority view. I really am not trying to win converts or bash pinyin-users -- I use it myself all the time. Like an axe, if used properly it's a tool with a limited purpose; if used carelessly it can do harm. I only feel it appropriate to bring up the issue, not push it relentlessly -- I won't allow myself to get dragged into that even here on the talk page.


 * True, pinyin represents the Beijing dialect precisely -- if the reader understands the system, and only to the degree that he does so. I object to the use of pinyin to teach Chinese pronounciation to novices; the illusion misleads that, say, a pinyin ch might be pronounced as a ch in English or French. My pinyin name is a case in point; most naive readers puzzle over it and blurt out something like KSOING (rhymes with "boing!") The initial sound (in the Beijing dialect) is a fricative midway between English s and sh; there is no exact English equivalent and few Americans can form the sound at all without a great deal of practice.


 * I think it is wiser to teach learners using actual Chinese -- spoken and written -- while those who merely need to refer to, say, a Chinese place name ought to translate it into their own tongues and scripts. No Chinese name is without intrinsic meaning: a mere untranslatable sound.


 * However, I don't intend to shove my whole agenda into this edit. There may be a place for that, but it's not here. I only intend to expose the issue -- the limitations, the risks -- so that readers may be aware of it. Perhaps I've been foolish to invite debate. I will not sit here and slug it out; the need for the notice is clear to me, but not the need to drag him into my camp.


 * My entire purpose for opening this question on the talk page first is discover if anyone wished to comment on the manner in which I give my warning. I still welcome comment in this vein; lacking it, I'll just do the best I can to avoid ruffling feathers. Xiong 00:42, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)


 * Well, of course you don't want to be KSOING. I know of several instances where someone changed their name to make it easier on the uninformed public and on themselves. Not only are there many pinyin strings that will appear unusual to English speakers, worse, some pinyin strings look exactly or almost like English words: if your name is Wang Boxing or Wang Fuxing, by all means use a different romanization. In terms of teaching Mandarin as a second language, you have to teach both: students need to learn to talk intelligibly, but they also need to learn about pinyin. Note that introducing pinyin early in second language teaching can be desirable, since teachers may not be native speakers of Mandarin themselves and may not actually make all phonological distinctions (often the -in vs. -ing distinction is lost); if students know how to read pinyin, they may pay more attention to this distinction even though it might be absent from their instructor's speech. As for the general public, I would keep my expectations low.  There is no reason to grossly mispronounce "Beijing", yet people do it all the time.  But then again people mispronounce "coup de grace" etc. too, even though French "grace" looks exactly like English "grace". --MarkSweep 01:20, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * It may not be an issue in China because grade school students are not taught English until later age. However, in the US, Bilingual Education program that teaches Mandarin and English at the same time in grade school will avoid pinyin all together.  Bilingual students learn Zhuyin FuHao instead of pinyin because it will make a mess when the students need to read English in the morning but read pinyin in the afternoon.  Grade school students are too young to learn pinyin and English at the same time and yet separate the pronunication rules cleanly.  Kowloonese 01:56, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)

Xiong: I don't see why you're making such a big deal out of this. Clearly pinyin (as well as all other Romanization schemes) is a tool, useful to an extent, and with both advantages and shortcomings. I've already listed some of the uses of pinyin above &mdash; yes, I know they have shortcomings, as all tools do when they are used for their purposes. If you want to go into these shortcomings, you are perfectly welcome to add more information either into pinyin or into Romanization in general.

However, I don't think there is need to -- ran (talk) 03:10, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) Ask anyone for permission before adding new information. As long as you're adding NPOV, informative stuff, I don't see why you need to be worried;
 * 2) Start the Chinese and English compared article. As Kappa said on its talk page, it'll likely get deleted. If the sole purpose of that article is to explore the disadvantages of Romanization, then everything in it should be in Romanization. An article with that name should be a general comparison of the two languages, and articles like that are likely to be deleted because Wikipedia, as an encyclopedia, does not generally include articles focused specifically on comparing and contrasting pairs of languages.

I find much of your recent edit, and the whole Chinese and English compared article as POV. Here are some of the claims you make and the problems with them:
 * Pinyin, like all systems of Romanization, has severe limitations which may act to mislead the unwary . Very POV -- uses insinuation by adding irrelevant context.
 * Pinyin is not an English translation. Casual readers may attempt to pronounce pinyin according to English conventions, producing sounds which are incorrect in any language. Uses an argument that would apply to the spelling system of any language. English speakers have particular trouble pronouncing French words for instance, but that doesn't mean that the French spelling system is deficient.  This reason is thus not relevant to the discussion.
 * Written Chinese preserves meaning so well that both Koreans and Japanese share the character set, but pinyin is based on sound alone; meaning is not preserved. Implies that Chinese characters preserve meaning, which is only a half-truth. In reality, they indicate semantic cues, but this is not the same as preserving meaning.  In addition, this statement implies that Koreans and Japanese use identical character sets, which they do not.  A better NPOV statement would be: "Chinese characters can indicate semantic cues.  But since pinyin is based on sound alone, these semantic cues are no longer preserved."
 * Spoken Mandarin Chinese is composed of a very small set of syllables; there is a plethora of homonyms. Pinyin (especially in the form of short phrases or single words) is therefore highly ambiguous. Readers must depend heavily on either context or prior knowledge to infer meanings; otherwise, misunderstandings will be the rule rather than the exception. I've mentioned this in Talk:Standard Mandarin, but I'll mention it here again. The homonym argument is a red herring.  It is a non-issue.  Pinyin is supposed to represent spoken language, not written language, which of course would include formal constructions that contain homonyms.  There is not confusion in spoken language because people will not deliberately use constructions that contain homonyms in spoken language.  Thus, there is no reason why pinyin cannot be used as an unambiguous representation of Mandarin.  Granted, formal and classical constructions will be lost in the process, but if the goal is to represent language as it is spoken and not some other constructed representation, then it is perfectly suited for the goal.  There's no reason why pinyin can't be unambiguous if there is no ambiguity among normal spoken Mandarin conversations.
 * Chinese and English are structurally different languages. See: Chinese and English compared. Structural arguments are completely irrelevant to representing the spoken language through pinyin. In addition, the new article you created serves no purpose but to push a particular POV.
 * But it should never be regarded as a replacement for or alternative to Chinese characters. You are pushing your own POV again here. There is no reason why this statement needs to be made if you've already presented your points (although I find most of your points to be highly specious in the first place).

This is not to say that I am for pinyinification of Chinese though. Pinyin has several other deficiencies, the most prominent in my opinion being that a huge percentage of China still does not speak Mandarin. If a pinyin writing system were put in place, they would no longer be able to read or write. For this reason, the logographic character system should remain in place.

I don't mean to be insulting, but such text does not meet Wikipedia standards. Please refer to NPOV tutorial. --Umofomia 09:39, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * I agree. Chamaeleon 11:10, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * I went ahead and made some NPOV changes to your entry, while trying to keep most of your arguments intact. Except for the structural argument, I did not delete any of your arguments and even elaborated on some of them so that they were better supported rather than seeming like statements of opinion.  I did however, add text indicating contrary arguments where appropriate.  I had to delete the structural argument because I could not think of any basis of support for it.  If you feel you have evidence in support of this argument, feel free to add it back in, but make sure it is adequately supported. --Umofomia 10:43, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Actually, I've been thinking... this argument shouldn't belong in pinyin, but rather in an article about Chinese romanization in general since it deals with controversy surrounding the use of romanization to represent Chinese, not about pinyin in particular. Putting such arguments in Romanization is probably not appropriate though since that article deals with romanization in other languages as well.  Here's a proposal... how about setting up a new article, Chinese romanization, that describes the issues surrounding the use of romanziation in Chinese?  --Umofomia 10:56, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Okay, I'm happy the group has taken an interest. I'm sure we can do together what we could not do alone. I hope NPOV is inclusive, rather than exclusive. It does not seem to me to be very neutral to simply eliminate all viewpoints other than the majority. If we could do that, then we could settle abortion/Tibet-Taiwan/intelligent design/gold standard with a simple show of hands and no more fuss. Instead we strive for balanced exposition.

It looks like, if I'm not careful, I'm going to spend more time in Talk then anywhere else. I'll try to catch up point-by-point. Please refer to these points by number; I can barely keep track of the discussion as it is.


 * 1) I had hoped not to make a big deal out of this. Indeed, I raised the point first in Talk in order to discuss how to put over my point without making a big deal out of it. I'd hoped for constructive criticism; I have a lot to learn. I would probably have done better to simply slam in the edit and let willing folks edit it around until we're all happy -- without ever directly discussing our edits or reasons behind them. Maybe.
 * 2) Sorry if my approach looked like "asking permission". I thought of it more as "building concensus".
 * 3) No point in discussing Chinese and English compared here; our plate is full enough. Its only relationship to pinyin is that a solid understanding of its contents is necessary to grasp the full weight of my arguments against pinyin. Perhaps I should go ahead and write the other article, but I suspect most of the people now in this discussion know what goes in there. Maybe not; q.v.
 * 4) "severe limitations": I say pinyin is severely limited. This is a relative term. Whether you agree with me probably depends on what you are comparing pinyin to. If you compare pinyin to W-G, you probably think it's great. If you compare pinyin to actual hanzi characters, you probably think it stinks.
 * 5) Naive American readers attempting to pronounce a word written properly in French, Spanish, or German will probably do fairly well. There are certainly differences, but the Roman alphabet works similarly in many European scripts.
 * 6) French, written in French, published in an American newspaper, is still French. Pinyin written in that same paper misleads the reader into beliving that he is looking at some form of Chinese.
 * 7) I believe that the average American thinks pinyin is a perfectly acceptable form of written Chinese. I'm not quite sure how to substantiate this allegation, but I'll try. Meanwhile, I hope it's not going too far to warn against such a misconception, if only for the benefit of the few.
 * 8) Chinese characters do preserve meaning; that is not a half-truth at all, unless you want to go way out on a metaphysical limb. Each character represents a unit of meaning, which is the virtue of the character set. A Japanese reader can look at a line of text written by a Chinese person and grasp much of the meaning, despite total ignorance of any Chinese spoken language.
 * 9) Pinyin is supposed to represent spoken language, not written language... Correct. And if it were invariably so used, I might have less to say. But in fact it is commonly used as a replacement for the written language, notably in the press. New China News Agency is the flagship offender, describing itself to the Western press in every feed as Xinhua.
 * 10) See e.g.:  "...Xie Xuren, director of the State Tax Administration..." The official in question has a name with a meaning, but this meaning has been destroyed. His agency has a name with a meaning, but that meaning has been preserved. Why not use the pinyin form for the name of the agency? Why not translate the official's name? Using pinyin in this manner creates the impression that there is a substantial difference between official and agency, when in truth both names are equally meaningful.
 * 11) If pinyin were only used to represent spoken Mandarin, again, I'd have fewer objections. But press reports from Guangzhou also use pinyin to describe people who do not speak Mandarin. The very term Guangzhou is pointless; I use it here because it is well understood, but why? An American writes about an event in the city, where the majority speak Cantonese. Guangzhou represents the sound of the name of the city when spoken by a person from Beijing. How is this relevant? Would it not be better to say West River City?
 * 12) Structural arguments are completely irrelevant to representing the spoken language through pinyin. You've redefined the problem out of existence. The biggest problem is when pinyin is used to represent the meaning of Chinese, not its sounds. If this never happened, we wouldn't in this furball. Again, I'll defend the other article on its own Talk page.
 * 13) But (pinyin) should never be regarded as a replacement for or alternative to Chinese characters. This is the meat of my edit, and I want it back in. Rather than just paste it back in and go for an edit war, I'd like to see if we can't agree on its validity. I say pinyin is often used in places where it would be more appropriate to use either the correct characters or an English translation; I say this is misuse. If we're going to slug it out, let's slug it out over this.
 * 14) I don't mean to be insulting, but such text does not meet Wikipedia standards. You're not insulting, I'm not offended, and I welcome comment and improvement. I'm extremely pleased that you took the time to make edits instead of deleting everything and bitching about it on the Talk page. Yours is the kind of contribution I respect all the more for coming from a POV opposed to mine. It's my thought that if we all work on this together, we can eventually produce something that does meet Wikipedia standards.
 * 15) ...this argument shouldn't belong in pinyin...how about setting up a new article, Chinese romanization...? You are correct, strictly speaking, and I'm not adverse to doing this. Pinyin is the dominant form of it, of course, and therefore misuse of pinyin is, today, most common. But I agree that all my arguments apply or have applied to W-G and other systems. My only reason for sticking my objections into Pinyin is that this is where folks are going.
 * 16) I'm not sure there is a justification for a new article, though. A new section ("Controversy") in Romanization may be the place for my comments, although I have some doubts. My arguments do apply disproportionately to Chinese; I have less objection to Romanization of, say, Arabic, because the script is phonetic to begin with.
 * 17) Please note, if personal considerations make any difference, that I am not Chinese, certainly not a native of Beijing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or anybody else with a regional or political agenda. (Whew!) My objections to pinyin are technical and relate more to logic and linguistics than anything else.

Again, many thanks, and please continue to edit and comment.Xiong 14:12, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)


 * It's a big mistake to think that "the Roman alphabet works similarly in many European scripts". A naive American reading a written French text as if it were English would almost certainly not be understood by a Frenchman (even if the latter knows English). Similarly a Frenchman reading an English text using French phonology would probably not be understood by an American.


 * Using the various applications of the same alphabet alternatingly is not a problem for children learning several languages at the same time. I learnt French, English and German during the same years and never experienced any confusion.


 * The difference in phonology between these and other European languages is surely as great as between Pinyin and any of these languages. For example, the sound of letter "x" in Spanish bears as little resemblance to the American "x" as the Pinyin "x" does.


 * &minus;Woodstone 16:50, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)


 * Also, an article called Chinese romanization would be misguided: The same criticism levelled against pinyin can also be brought against the Zhuyin symbols (bo-po-mo-fo), which are not based on Roman letters, or against IPA transcriptions, which are mostly based on the Latin alphabet, but which are internationally understood. Also note that "Chinese romanization" is a contradiction in terms, since one cannot transcribe "Chinese", only specific languages/dialects like Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. The more appropriate location for any such debate would therefore be Phonemic writing systems for Chinese languages. --MarkSweep 17:20, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Debate ensues
This is all turning into a debate about the merits of pinyin. Debates like this should have been pre-empted by the NPOV policy.

I think the most important thing here, is that Wikipedia is meant to provide information, not advocacy of any kind. For example, the Wikipedia article on pinyin should include a detached and fair account of all the arguments that have been brought for or against pinyin. It should not be a line of argument or a guidebook that seeks to guide the reader to any particular conclusion. If you come in here and explicitly state that you're trying to do this, then obviously you'll meet a lot of opposition.

Furthermore, the very point of NPOV is so that you don't need to argue over everything you put in. An NPOV should be acceptable to all parties because everyone feels that their views are being amply represented. If you find that lots of people are disputing what you're putting into an article, then something is already wrong &mdash; it means that your addition has not taken sufficiently into consideration their points of view.

Xiong: I suggest that you look over your points, and imagine what your opponents have to say about them. Then insert those points yourself. Ask yourself: would the article seem skewed to someone with a different point of view? Is it turning into a long list of the arguments of only one side? If it is, change it yourself. Instead of having an article that advocates something, make it a detached account of a debate by an impassionate judge. This way you save yourself and others lots of time, since we don't have to sit around the talk page going over a debate that'll probably never convince anyone.

-- ran (talk) 17:04, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * The sound of x in English and Spanish is very different. But I don't agree that a naive American reading written Spanish (or French) will muddle it as badly as one reading pinyin. English and Spanish (and French) are much more closely related than any of these to any Chinese language. I admit that I have not put this to the test. Note that the text already spoke to the novel mapping of pinyin before I put in my oar.
 * The hazard of pinyin is not just that it obscures meaning; it is that it presents a false image of transparency. This can be debated, but I ask that my respected opponents directly confront my examples.
 * I agree that an article, Chinese romanization is a mistake, and my comments either belong here in Pinyin or in the main Romanization article; I'm leaning toward the latter.
 * "Chinese romanization" is a contradiction in terms -- strictly speaking, pinyin is a type of transcription, rather than transliteration; it is a Romanization of spoken Mandarin. I actually agree with this statement and feel it supports my position.
 * If pinyin were invariably used merely to transcribe Mandarin sounds, I would never raise the substantive issue. My problem is with the tendency to use pinyin to stand in for Chinese concepts.
 * This is all turning into a debate about the merits of pinyin. -- Perhaps; but I am not going to stand on either side of that debate. I don't feel I need to attack pinyin or value it on a scale from 0 to 10. I only think it has a limited application and all Wikipedia readers, especially those thinking about writing pinyin for public consumption, should be advised not to exceed its limits. This caution is prompted by ubiquitous abuse.
 * Debates like this should have been pre-empted by the NPOV policy.
 * This debate arose when I solicited comment for the purpose of building concensus, presumably around a NPOV expression of my concerns.
 * One man's NPOV is another's violent, fanatic defense of patent nonsense. I approve highly of the principle of NPOV while realizing that, as human beings, we are all going to have different opinions. We have shooting wars in the desert -- still, today, in an enlightened age -- because (among other reasons, such as simple greed) intelligent men of goodwill sometimes cannot even agree on what is fact and what is opinion. If I point to my position and say, "This is a fact, therefore opinion does not enter into the matter," that does not make it so. Equally, if I point to your comment and say, "That is mere opinion, therefore it does not belong here," I have only stated my opinion.
 * Though the debate in here may be raucous, the actual progress of the article is correct: from incomplete, to more complete yet biased, to more complete and less biased. This is what we all want, right?
 * If you come in here and explicitly state that you're trying to do this, then obviously you'll meet a lot of opposition. -- Sorry; you may be right when you say I've used confrontational language. But then, I don't fear debate, or intellectual attack. If I'm wrong, so be it. If I'm right, but somebody wants to call me a filthy tadpole, that's okay too. You don't build an informative article from colorless factoids uninformed by opinion. I'd rather see an article that presents a balanced spectrum of opinions along with universally agreed-upon fact. I trust we are all ladies and gentlemen here and we can disagree on matters while still feeling that we are all pulling toward the same goal. I hope we all still have enough of a sense of humor about the matter that I can use words like "fistfight" to describe a debate without anyone running for a box of Band-Aids.
 * I assert it is a fact that pinyin is able to do some things and not able to do others. I assert that, nonetheless, it is commonly used to do things which exceed its capacities. I feel the need to notice the reader to this hazard. I welcome comment, criticism, and correction on the means by which Wikipedia makes this notice. But you cannot expect me to argue against it. That is the role of those who differ in their opinions. Xiong 19:03, 2005 Mar 10 (UTC)

Our Story Thus Far: Xiong considered adding a notice to the reader, advising not to exceed the limitations of pinyin, which he considers severe. Debate ensued, to little purpose lacking specific text to critique. Xiong added a few paragraphs to Pinyin. These were heavily edited by Umofomia. Debate here on the talk page continued, revolving around four points:


 * 1) Just how limited is pinyin, and in what way?
 * 2) Is this notice information or only advocacy?
 * 3) Is there any need for such a notice, even if factual?
 * 4) Is this article (Pinyin) the correct place to make such notice?

The last point seems to be moving towards consensus that this is not the right place for it. The idea is now to move the notice to another place and replace it here with a line of introduction to the place where it more properly belongs. A new article was considered and rejected at once; a paragraph or two under Romanization is proposed.


 * Ok, I'm repeating myself here, but Romanization is a red herring. What Xiong is debating is the appropriate use of phonemic transcriptions of Mandarin (or persumably any other Chinese language/dialect). Phonemic transcriptions don't necessarily use Roman letters (cf. Zhuyin Fuhao, likewise there could be transcriptions using Cyrillic or Greek letters, which shouldn't be referred to as Romanization); in other words, the issue is not about Romanization. Instead, what's at issue here is that a phonemic writing system would be quite different from standard Chinese writing. This is an issue that could be discussed under "writing systems for Chinese languages" etc. This issue is conceptually different from specific issues relating to Romanization (which at least nominally excludes Zhuin Fuhao) and Hanyu Pinyin in particular. --MarkSweep 20:50, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * You know, I half agree with you on that. I do object to any such system on many of the same grounds. Bopomofo is intrinsically as bad as pinyin. It replaces (or substitutes for, or is used in place of, let's not fight over the verb) units of meaning with units of sound. I object to that. (And just so we all stay cool, I accept that pinyin and bopomofo are here to stay; I only think the reader needs to be aware of the problem.)


 * But, I feel the caution or notice is especially appropriate to pinyin, due to its widespread use among people who know nothing at all about Chinese -- at second hand, as it were. I feel pinyin's superficial similarity to English is misleading.


 * Take written Vietnamese as a counter-example. For one, it really has been adopted by the Vietnamese people as the official writen language -- it is not a pale imitation. For another, it is almost always written with diacriticals. This implicitly alerts the reader that this is not English and cannot be read as if it were. Pinyin as commonnly used fails both these tests.


 * I would feel much less driven to comment if pinyin were invariably written with diacriticals. But (as I've mentioned) I have personally seen many different kinds of applications and many instances in which pinyin is written bare, which aggravates both of my grievances: it further muddies meanings by proliferating homonyms, and it seduces the naive reader into believing he might be able to pronounce it.


 * I don't know, maybe my comments belong under General semantics. --Xiong 02:56, 2005 Mar 11 (UTC)


 * The sound of x in English and Spanish is very different. But I don't agree that a naive American reading written Spanish (or French) will muddle it as badly as one reading pinyin. - Remember that pinyin was designed from the outset to be phonemically regular. Most European writing systems, on the other hand, have vestiges left over from centuries of sound change. How is a French person going to pronounce "knight"? How is an English person going to pronounce "châteaux"? The problems here are just as bad as those associated with pinyin, if not worse.
 * The hazard of pinyin is not just that it obscures meaning; it is that it presents a false image of transparency. - Why would it? When a Westerner sees a "zh" or "q" or an "x", e.g. in "Zhengzhou" or "Qianxian", he/she is probably not going to see a particularly transparent image.
 * My problem is with the tendency to use pinyin to stand in for Chinese concepts. - Where, if any, can such a tendency be observed?
 * Take written Vietnamese as a counter-example. For one, it really has been adopted by the Vietnamese people as the official writen language -- it is not a pale imitation. For another, it is almost always written with diacriticals. This implicitly alerts the reader that this is not English and cannot be read as if it were. Pinyin as commonnly used fails both these tests.  What gave you such an impression? Since a regular non-Vietnamese person wouldn't know what the diacritics mean anyways, when he/she sees Ti&#7871;ng Vi&#7879;t, what difference is there between that and plain "Tieng Viet" to him/her? I don't know Vietnamese; when I see "Ti&#7871;ng Vi&#7879;t" I'd pronounce it [tjEN vjEt], because I don't know any better. How is the presence of diacritics somehow "less" misleading?
 * One man's NPOV is another's violent, fanatic defense of patent nonsense. I approve highly of the principle of NPOV while realizing that, as human beings, we are all going to have different opinions. We have shooting wars in the desert -- still, today, in an enlightened age -- because (among other reasons, such as simple greed) intelligent men of goodwill sometimes cannot even agree on what is fact and what is opinion. If I point to my position and say, "This is a fact, therefore opinion does not enter into the matter," that does not make it so. Equally, if I point to your comment and say, "That is mere opinion, therefore it does not belong here," I have only stated my opinion.  It is rather meaningless to say that "One man's NPOV is another's violent, fanatic defense of patent nonsense" - when something like this happens, then by definition, that one man's NPOV is not NPOV, no matter what that one man thinks or argues. Nor can anyone say "That is mere opinion, therefore it does not belong here," because the point of NPOV is to collect all POV's. -- ran (talk) 00:49, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)

Strange deletion in section "Orthographic features"
Some lines have been deleted from the section Pinyin. The change seems to be unintentional, and should be reverted. The last version with the full section is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pinyin&direction=prev&oldid=9399704#Orthographic_features

However, other (possibly meaningful) edits may have been made to the section subsequently. I don't know how to revert this change - can someone else do it? --Niels Ø 13:58, Mar 11, 2005 (UTC)


 * This looks like an engine bug. I have carefully compared old and new versions -- and, by the way, the old version you cited is pretty old, too -- and I don't see that anything has been added to the section in question. Now, when I hit the "Edit this page" button on the old page, I get the standard warning at the top: I'm editing an old page. But the markup inside the edit box is the chopped-off, newer stuff. Perhaps the engine has collapsed under the weight of all the weirdo markup and special characters. I will try to fix it anyway, but I suspect that the next time the page is edited, the problem may reappear. --Xiong 03:46, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)


 * I've restored the missing text and agree it was probably not lost deliberately. Since I couldn't get the old wiki markup out of the old edit box, I copied directly from the HTML source of the old page. This did not display well, so I half-Wikified it, and now it displays properly.


 * I think it may be better not to completely Wikify the markup for this section. I've tried to edit it again, and the HTML is still intact. In software development circles, this is what we used to call "mystery code" -- you don't know why it works, but it does work, so you don't mess with it. --Xiong 03:59, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)


 * I wikified it anyway... it seems to work okay now. --Umofomia 07:15, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Okay, great. It looks good now. If it blows up again, maybe we'll get more information on why. --Xiong 14:18, 2005 Mar 12 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the good work! --Niels Ø 08:56, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)

Strange paragraph
''Computer systems long provided the most convincing argument in favor of pinyin; early computers were able to display nothing but 7-bit ASCII (essentially the 26 letters, the 10 digits, and a handful of punctuation marks). Most contemporary computer systems are now able to readily display characters from not only Chinese, but from many other writing systems as well. In addition, multiple input method editors exist that use standard keyboards to type them (pinyin being one such method). Now, PDAs and digitizing tablets allow users to write characters with a stylus, which can then be stored and edited like any text. Thus, this justification is no longer as strong as it used to be. ''

In what way does computer display capabilities provide "the most convincing argument in favour of pinyin"? The most widespread uses of pinyin - in transliteration, education, dictionaries, computer input - have nothing to do with the capability of computers in displaying Chinese characters. -- ran (talk) 00:29, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)


 * I think the logic was that if it were the case that computers continued to be restricted to ASCII only, then the only way the Chinese would be able to continue functioning in an increasingly computer-oriented world would be to write in pinyin only. However, because of new encoding schemes such as GB, Big5, and later Unicode, this argument no longer became relevant.  The use of the "most convincing" qualifier does sound like peacock strutting though, so it should probably be removed.  --Umofomia 01:30, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * This is still a big issue with embedded systems, which by-the-way make up the majority of computers in this world, not PCs as you all are accustomed to. Switching from ASCII to UNICODE in an embedded device is not somethig to be taken lightly. An embedded device might not even have the memory available to store the bitmaps of such a large character set.  And without Pinyin a device would often have to redesigned to be made available in the Chinese market.

Overly complex representation of vowels (combined into finals)
I have just been adding  (engma) in the table I took to be the consonants. However, I now realised the heading is "initials". There is a very complex table giving the "finals" (combinations of vowels and consonants, using unexplained terms nucleus medial and coda). For explanation of the Pinyin system to English readers, a traditional split in consonants and vowels is much more appropriate. Most vowels have a reasonably clear IPA (or English) sound. Only a few exception rules need to be added for a complete picture. For me for sure the current table does not work to provide an overview. &minus;Woodstone 20:15, 2005 May 5 (UTC)


 * No, the consonant / vowel split would not work. Most (All) vowel letters do not have a clear vowel sound, and their pronunciations change depending on the medial and coda. A consonant / vowel analysis, while "perhaps" more reflective of underlying phonemes, would be massively complex and bewildering. In contrast, the initial / final system has been in use since the rime books of the Six Dynasties. It is also the underlying "mindset" of systems like zhuyin and pinyin, so it would serve us well to explain pinyin in terms of initials and finals. -- ran (talk) 17:10, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

The current tables seem to explain the pronunciation in terms of pronunciation. This is circular. Both the rows, columns and cells all contain IPA symbols. It is absolutely unclear how this must be read. I would need a table explaining the pronunciation of pinyin based on only pinyin writing and expressed in IPA. So if both rows and columns are needed, they should not contain any IPA. Only the cells should contain IPA. &minus;Woodstone


 * Do you mean the finals table? The IPA symbols in the rows and columns are (broad) phonemic. The IPA symbols in the cells are phonetic. The entire arrangement reflects a common (but not the only way) of analyzing the phonology of the Beijing dialect. I don't know what you mean by "explaining the pronunciation of pinyin based on only pinyin writing..." how would you explain pinyin with pinyin? -- ran (talk) 17:33, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

The table as it stands is (perhaps) suitable for writing down a Chinese word in pinyin if you know how to pronounce it (in Mandarin). What I need is the reverse. A systematic description of how I should read aloud a word written in pinyin. So the table should give the sounds (expressed in IPA) that certain pinyin letter combinations have. &minus;Woodstone 17:40, July 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * That is already given in both the initials table and the finals table, and then given again in the tables below. If you'd like to see a step-by-step guide, there's one over at Wikibooks (b:Chinese: Fundamentals of the language). -- ran (talk) 17:43, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

The "finals" table at the bottom just gives all combinations without any structure. What I am looking for is the underlying system. A set of rules plus a few exceptions, like " (pinyin) is pronounced like /a/ (IPA), but if after ... and followed by ... it is pronounced like /e/". &minus;Woodstone 18:02, July 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * Oh... well, I'm afraid that if you give all of the exceptions, it will look just like a table with all of the combinations. Every combination is an exception.


 * The pronunciation of the nucleus vowel is determined by the medial and the coda, but never by the initial. However, the number of medial + nucleus + coda = final combinations is very limited. This is the best reason for the initial / final analysis, and also why this article is organized in this way.


 * The tables at the bottom are indeed very unsystematic, which is why a systematic approach is provided in the tables on top. -- ran (talk) 18:08, July 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * If you want to learn pinyin pronunciation, the best way is to just memorize all of the combinations... The vowels will never come in any environment other than those combinations. -- ran (talk) 18:18, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

I think you are overly pessimistic about the number of exceptions. For example almost always adding an "i" after another vowel has the same effect. But apart from that, still the given finals table on top is for encoding pinyin, not for decoding. Nevertheless it might help if the order of the columns in the table for medial, nucleus, coda would be in the same sequence as in the pinyin spelling (and if they were explained). The way the table is now organised makes it a real maze. Could you please give a try to clearing it up? &minus;Woodstone 18:37, July 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * Um... not really. "i" is added only after three vowels, forming diphthongs (triphthongs) in all three cases: "a", "e", "u". In the first case, the "a" becomes a low front vowel rather than a low back vowel. In the second case, "e" becomes a mid-high front vowel rather than a mid-low back vowel. The third case, "ui", is a mandatory shorthand for "uei", not u + i. All three cases are exceptions, and the effects are not the same at all.


 * All of the tables are for decoding rather than encoding... which particular part do you find confusing? The combinations given combine the medial, nucleus, and coda. -- ran (talk) 18:44, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

A table for decoding cannot have IPA symbols in row headers, only latin (pinyin) letters. By decoding I mean finding pronunciation from pinyin spelling. So the entry (headers) into the table should be pinyin letters. The cells could then contain the proper IPA symbols. Furthermore it is confusing that the sequence of the table structure is nucleus, coda, medial, which not the order of these elements in speech (and writing). &minus;Woodstone 19:00, July 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * Hmmm.. I see what you mean. In this case the tables at the bottom (not the top) should be used as decoding tables. Or how about the Wikibooks tutorial? That one was written (by me :P) and is designed for decoding. -- ran (talk) 19:03, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

pinyin letter frequency
in Chinese text translated using pinyin, what's the letter frequency? Xah Lee 09:33, 2005 May 14 (UTC)

strange symbols in pinyin tables
Someone made an edit modifying many pinyin spellings to contain strange symbols (that do not display in my system). This cannot be right, since pinyin uses only standard latin letters with perhaps an umlaut added.

Anyway, the conception of the finals table escapes me. It seems to be a weird combination of IPA and latin, obscuring any logic to the systrem. Can someoone knowledgable do an overhaul? &minus;Woodstone 13:35, July 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * The lower-case letter "a" and "g" in pinyin is supposed to be of the handwritten type with no curl over the top or bottom. --[[w:zh:User:zy26|zy26 (Talk)]] 13:55, July 10, 2005 (UTC)

In normal writing using the latin alphabet, the curls over/under a and g are just font variants. They do not represent any difference in letters. My guess is that no reader of an English encyclopedia would notice any difference between the letter versions. Actually in the default wiki font in my browser the g does not have a curl. The specific symbols do not render well in IE6, used by a very large portion of readership.I would say it's better to go with the standard a and g as they happen to appear in the chosen fonts, than produce a square box for some readers. &minus;Woodstone 15:46, July 10, 2005 (UTC)


 * In my browser the letter "g" does not have a curl, too.  a g, can anyone see them? Maybe I need a template of Pinyin just like IPA...--zy26 was here. 13:56, 11 July 2005 (UTC)


 * I replaced the a and g with standard symbols. What Woodstone says is absolutely correct; the modified a and g are appropriate as IPA symbols *only*. Benwing 02:18, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

history of pinyin
hi, how come there is no history section in this entire article?? Who started pinyin? We know that Wade-Giles is from a man called Wade and another man called Giles, but what about pinyin? Was it one man or a group of people that came up with this system? thanks. ---Hottentot
 * The PRC government invented it in the 1950's. I agree that more info is needed... -- ran (talk) 17:53, July 10, 2005 (UTC)
 * Is Pinyin considered the best way of transliteration Chinese characters? If so, why? --Hottentot

Not the best way, just the most common way. Whether it's the "best" is a very subjective judgement. -- ran (talk) 05:29, July 11, 2005 (UTC)
 * Ok, thanks. By the way, when you have the time, would you be able to look over and correct some of Lapsed Pacifist's edits on Government of Tibet in Exile and Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama? Thanks. --Hottentot

Pinyin in Taiwan
The last paragraph of the #Pinyin in Taiwan section says " Pinyin has officially been adopted in Taiwan in 2004 ". Is it true Hanyu Pinyin has been adopted? The first paragraph of the same section says " The Republic of China on Taiwan is in the process of adopting a modified version of pinyin (currently Tongyong Pinyin). ". &mdash; Instantnood 15:26, July 11, 2005 (UTC)
 * I remember it was adopted officially in KMT-controlled Taipei City, where MRT signages started using Pinyin spellings. Not too sure about other KMT areas thou, so that line may be changed to "some parts of Taiwan"?--Huaiwei 15:45, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
 * Right.. but the first few paragraphs of the section have already described about the situation that national and local governments have different policies. :-| &mdash; Instantnood 16:02, July 11, 2005 (UTC)

mistakes/omissions in table?
I am very glad that a complete table of finals and their pronunciation is given, since most descriptions in textbooks are incomplete about the various complexities.

But the pronunciation listed for the 'ing' final seems wrong. The listed pronunciation but it seems to me that it should be. The former would sound like English "young", but when I've heard words like "Yingwen" pronounced, the first part sounds like English "ing". Can a native speaker verify this?

Also, the "exhaustive" list of finals below is obviously not exhaustive, as it leaves out -in, -ing, and probably others. It's not completely clear we need this table, as it duplicates the table before it; although the nontechnical descriptions are probably useful for readers who don't know IPA. Benwing 02:25, 10 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, the list of finals with informal explanations of their pronunciation does seem to be incomplete, and I agree that the informal definitions are helpful. As for ying, I'm not sure what should be there. The current entry would appear to be prescriptively correct, at least. I also reverted the edit that replaced some of the IPA characters with ASCII characters: in IPA there is a difference between /a/ (front) and /ɑ/ (back), the two are not interchangeable. If they appear "broken", that probably indicates a font problem. See the IPA notice near the beginning of the article for futher information. --MarkSweep 02:43, 10 August 2005 (UTC)


 * MarkSweep, your reversion was incorrect. I am aware of the IPA differences (I am a linguistics grad student), but the changes I made were *not* in IPA representations but in the Latin representation of pinyin, which is a purely alphabetic standard that should not have unusual glyphs in it. Benwing 04:29, 10 August 2005 (UTC)


 * Oops, you are right. I misread your changes. Sorry about that. --MarkSweep 05:01, 10 August 2005 (UTC)


 * It appears that there was a systematic effort to use IPA symbols everywhere that went a bit overboard: see this diff. Benwing is right that IPA symbols should not be used in pinyin. --MarkSweep 05:35, 10 August 2005 (UTC)

Use of different g-like symbol.
What does the use of ɡ in pinyin and pinyin mean? Laundrypowder 03:32, 11 August 2005 (UTC)


 * See the immediately preceding comments: it's an IPA symbol. If you can easily distinguish it, replace it with an ordinary letter g in ordinary text (but not in IPA, of course). --MarkSweep 03:48, 11 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Much appreciated. I saw the other post but didn't quit put it together with the pronunciation!  As only a casual student of pinyin, I had never seen it used before and apart from reading through the IPA page, there was no explanation of that symbol's use.  Laundrypowder 04:00, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Character rendering issues discussed/explained elsewhere, don't worry about answering here. Laundrypowder 02:01, 12 August 2005 (UTC)

Ambiguity in table
For the [i] entry in the table the description reads, "like English "ee", except when preceded by "c", "ch", "r", "s", "sh", "z" or "zh"; in these cases it should be pronounced as a natural extension of those sounds in the same position, but slightly more open to allow for a clear-sounding vowel to pass through"

OK, but which vowel? --Tydaj 01:41, 7 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I've been sounding these syllables out for days now, and have yet to come up with any verbal description that could describe these sounds. You just have to hear it.  Maybe some Chinese textbook for beginners has a good description; does anyone have such a book, and if so, what does it say about how to pronounce these syllables?  Is it possible to upload sound clips?  Badagnani 03:34, 10 September 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps a syllabic alveolar approximant (after z, c, s) or syllabic retroflex approximant (after zh, ch, sh, r). In the case of "ri", it's almost as if there's just one vowel: a syllabic retroflex approximant. -- ran (talk) 03:56, September 10, 2005 (UTC)

I can't find anywhere how to represent that final -i in IPA. In Li & Thompson table 1.4, transcriptions are given which are not even on the IPA chart! 219.87.12.250 09:47, 25 September 2005 (UTC)


 * The problem is that these two vowels are usually given as and  in publications that ostensibly use IPA, but this is not official IPA usage:


 * {|class="wikitable"


 * Pinyin || zi || ci || si || zhi || chi || shi
 * IPA || ||  ||  ||  ||  ||
 * non-standard "IPA" || ||  ||  ||  ||  ||
 * }
 * non-standard "IPA" || ||  ||  ||  ||  ||
 * }


 * These symbols are used in most publications dealing with Sino-Tibetan languages. — Babelfisch 06:40, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Now that I think about it, maybe we should keep with the tradition, and use these symbols as well. We should also start separate articles to explain what these are. -- ran (talk) 11:55, 26 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm certainly in favour of using those symbols, in line with the sino-linguistic community, but I think a small note to explain them would be sufficient, not separate articles (unless all IPA and non-IPA phonetic symbols have their own articles). There are also non-standard-IPA symbols for the rounded versions of and . — Babelfisch 01:26, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Ah, thank you! Do you think you could place it on the following vowel chart? As you will see there is already a vowel on it that has no IPA symbol.

--Tydaj 04:39, 4 October 2005 (UTC)

=
======== As this is a non-specialist environment I would strongly recommend you stick to IPA and nothing but IPA. One set of incomprehensible squiggly marks is more than enough for laymen. An entirely separate article on the subject of specialized phonetic symbols used in Sino-Tibetanology would be fascinating.

If you absolutely must, you can use IPA diacritics on the cardinal IPA vowels to get the exact representation you want in strict IPA.

But the cardinal IPA vowels are almost never exactly even the phoneme you intend in any given language, let alone the allophone. Every single basic vowel in American English needs IPA diacritics added to the cardinal vowel to represent it at all accurately -- and no one ever does that. How exact a representation do Wikipedia readers need of your Chinese sound?

Some Thoughts on Content and Usability Issues for Article Revision
1. Make GIFs of all IPA symbols (and Chinese characters) -- many users are seeing "??" everywhere.

2. Regarding zh -- is the IPA Retroflex Approximate really the same as the Voiced Retroflex Fricative, or is there some friction missing?

3. The Finals chart is cruel and inscrutible to anyone not familiar with Chinese syllable thinking. It needs explanations of the "zero" sign (which should really not be used as it looks just like an IPA symbol BTW) and schwa used in the Nucleus column, and then explanations of what is happening with those very unexpected and unpredictable phonetic and spelling changes that occur when the elements are combined.

4. In "Rules given in terms of English pronunciation", are these Aveolo-Palatals really getting "passed backwards along my tongue"? Can't I pass them with the dutchy on the lefthand side instead? Is there not something still going on in the aveolar region, and do I need a complete lexicon of Portugese at this moment? And many other complaints about inexactitude and rambling throughout. What is always lacking and always needed in phonetic "description" is specific instructions: "Raise the middle of your tongue to here. Raise the tip of your tongue to here. Do this with your jaw and lips. Do this with your breath and vocal cords." -- 66.81.221.246, 8 November 2005


 * ad 1. No GIFs, please. Getting a browser to display Chinese characters and IPA in Unicode is not such a big problem, and GIF's would be a nightmare: people who can input Chinese and IPA can do so fairly quickly, and people who can't won't be able to deal with the GIFs either. Besides that, GIFs take much longer to load and won't fit in with the rest of the text.


 * ad 3. I agree, the chart is not perfect. The problem is that the symbols used in the grey boxes are a mixture of Pinyin (ng) and IPA ([y]). That's confusing.


 * ad 4. I'm not a big fan of "rules given in terms of English pronunciation", because without linguistic training, monolingual English speakers won't be able to use them anyways. — Babelfisch 01:27, 9 November 2005 (UTC)


 * With regards to point 1, I agree that we should not replace the unicode with GIFs. GIFs are rather unwieldy to handle in this context.  It's also become a very straight forward process to enable the display of East Asian character sets these days. --BenjaminTsai Talk 14:17, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

Finding this page
The term pinying is sometimes used. Is this incorrect?

Anyway, I put in a redirect from Pinying. Singkong2005 04:52, 11 November 2005 (UTC)


 * Yes, "Pinying" is absolutely wrong. The difference between -n and -ng is crucial in most Chinese dialects, but not all of them. The source of this mistake is either complete ignorance of non-Chinese speakers, or dialect influence of Chinese speakers. — Babelfisch 05:48, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I've added Template:R from misspelling. -- ran (talk) 07:59, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

Capitalization
Should "pinyin" be written in upper case or lower case? It appears both ways in this article. Badagnani 03:02, 11 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Pinyin does not need to be capitalized. However when spelling it out as "Hanyu Pinyin", it needs to be capitalized. --BenjaminTsai Talk 14:10, 31 December 2005 (UTC)

"Pinyin" needs to be capitalized, because it is a proper name for "Hanyu Pinyin".

Move?
To make more explicit that this article is on Hanyu Pinyin and not Tongyong Pinyin and clear any possible confusion, I propose that this page be moved to "Hanyu Pinyin". Comments? --Jiang 07:33, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. --BenjaminTsai Talk 08:14, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Good idea. -- A human 08:16, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
 * against. The great majority in readers will just know the name pinyin and will never have heard of either hanyu or tongyong. So its better to have a pinyin article that describes the most common version of pinyin and possibly indicate and refer to the other one. &minus;Woodstone 10:17, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
 * If the article is moved to "Hanyu Pinyin", then "pinyin" will most likely contain/redirect to Pinyin (disambiguation). This should take care of the issue you're pointing out, but I can understand your perspective and actually look somewhat favorably on it because of my bias against Tongyong Pinyin. ;-) --BenjaminTsai Talk 10:37, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Either keep it as it is, or redirect Pinyin to Hanyu Pinyin, with a disambiguation notice to bring readers to Tongyong Pinyin and Postal System Pinyin. &mdash; Instantnood 21:56, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Support move and redirect from "pinyin" to "Hanyu Pinyin". --MarkSweep (call me collect) 07:09, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Oppose move. The only pinyin most English speakers (and Chinese learners) know is Hanyu Pinyin.  The Tongyong system came much later, and is partly based on the Hanyu system; give it its own article under "Tongyong pinyin" and leave Hanyu Pinyin as Pinyin.  Badagnani 08:03, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Hanyu Pinyin is often referred to by its full name. The zh wikipedia has the article at 汉语拼音 with 拼音 redirecting to 汉语拼音. I propose we do the same (so Hanyu Pinyin will retain precedence): move this article to "Hanyu Pinyin", redirect "Pinyin" to "Hanyu Pinyin" and leave a dab note at the top "Pinyin redirects here. For other uses, see Tongyong Pinyin and Postal System Pinyin". Users looking for pinyin without the Hanyu will still be redirected to the article they are seeking. --Jiang 08:15, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Oppose move. For the vast majority of people Pinyin is Hanyu pinyin. Typing Pinyin in the search box should lead directly to Pinyin article. LDHan 09:49, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
 * That's what redirects are for. Typing in "pinyin" would still redirect to Hanyu Pinyin as User:Jiang suggested. —  Indi  [ talk ] 14:35, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Support move and redirect per User:Instantnood. (I hope it's not too late to vote now) —  Indi  [ talk ] 14:35, 10 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Oppose. Tongyong and Postal pinyin are not even remotely close to the original system in terms of usage, recognition and notability. It's an issue that only concerns Chinese Wikipedia. The deference shown to non-PRC issues is exaggerated as it is. / Peter Isotalo 08:03, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Special characters--where are they?
Does anyone know what happened to the selection of "Special characters" below the edit screen, for use to insert into articles while editing (including vowels with pinyin tone marks)? They are mostly not there any more, and nobody responds on the various "help" pages where I have asked about this. Maybe if more people start to ask, whoever removed these will replace them so we can get back to work. Badagnani 08:24, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

The pinyin characters can now be found in the drop down menu just below the edit screen. Drop down to "Pinyin" to get the tone marks. Badagnani 09:43, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

say jingle bells, not ajar
For the j example, say "as in jingle bells" or just jingle, instead of ajar. I recall this is closer theoretically.210.200.105.227 21:06, 18 January 2006 (UTC)

Shanxi vs Shaanxi spelling
How about including a short reference to this special case under miscellanea? Maybe something like "A special case exists regarding the spelling of two neighboring provinces (山西 Shānxī; 陕西 Shǎnxī) whose pronunciation are almost identical except for the tone of the first syllable. The common practice of omitting tone marks therefore renders the two names identical, so to address this ambiguity, the names are spelt Shanxi and Shaanxi respectively, unless if written with tone marks." Infohunter 17:40, 30 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Found some reference about this. Chinese government seems to follow this rule:
 * http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/43602.htm
 * http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/43599.htm
 * There's a short remark on the Shaanxi page. Talamus 14:30, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

final -r
Is final -r retroflex? I've heard that its sound is clearly distinct from initial r-, but on this page, the same IPA transcription is used for both sounds. 84.73.159.74 08:51, 17 March 2006 (UTC)

I've copied this in from the Standard Mandarin article for the chart footnote:

'''/ɻ/ is often transcribed as [ʐ] (a voiced retroflex fricative). This represents a variation in pronunciation among different speakers, rather than two different phonemes.'''

The distinction in sound between these two is very subtle. I've never seen a mention of a distinct final R sound, but I think (and I'm such the non-expert in these matters I warn you) that in Beijing dialect the final R does alter something in pronunciation of the word, but it's not the R itself that changes... (?)

For that matter, this page simply states as a fact that final -r is written in pinyin, but http://www.pinyin.info/romanization/compare/hanyu.html does not show any sign of this, and the Microsoft Pinyin IME knows nothing of it. Perhaps the page needs to discuss?

Question
Hi, we need Chinese language help at Chinese wine. There's a wine which isn't yet discussed that is sold as "hung-lu" wine. It is reddish in color, a sharp smell, and a chemically, diesel-like taste, and is sold by the Oriental Mascot brand (which also makes mijiu and formerly also made Shaoxing jiu). The largest photo of this wine is here, but the characters aren't easily readable. I think "hung-lu" isn't Hanyu pinyin. Can someone provide information about this wine, the characters, etc.? Thank you! http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/images/B0000DJZ0F/ref=dp_primary-product-display_0/102-4042702-9901704?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=3370831&s=gourmet-food Badagnani 19:31, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Lead section
It is perfectly fine to begin the lead section with the more specific, technical, or official term, like how United States begins with "United States of America" and Bill Clinton begins with "William Jefferson Clinton". I don't see why the article needs to begin with "Pinyin". --Jiang 17:13, 18 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Simply because a great majority of the readers will be suprised to see the well known transcription method suddenly have an unfamiliar name. &minus;Woodstone 17:39, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't see the validity in your point, that readers will be "suprised". I'm fine with the current text as it is neither misleading nor inaccurate, but I don't see the precedent in Wikipedia for this funnel-shaped lead section approach. The standard is to start with the definition in bold face and let any disambiguation headers do their job. "Pinyin" can be a stand alone term in all appearances in the article after the first, except the part on comparison with other systems- this should make it obvious enough. Just because most people do not know about Madonna (entertainer)'s three other names, Louise Veronica Ciccone, does not mean we should purge it from the bolded text. --Jiang 21:10, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

this section does not apply to mandarin..?
"For example, the sounds indicated in pinyin by b and g correspond more closely to the sounds indicated by p and k in Western use of the Latin script. Other letters, like j, q, x or zh indicate sounds that do not correspond to any exact sound in English. Some of the transcriptions in pinyin, such as the ang ending, do not correspond to English pronunciations, either."

While in china, i have never confused b with p, or g with k. J and zh sound like the english j, q is like ch, and x is like sh. Does this section apply to non-Mandarin dialects, or is it just incorrect?

68.197.167.243 23:40, 1 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Sure it applies to Mandarin. Pinyin is designed for standard Mandarin, but my Chinese teacher said that it is really intended for the Beijing accent.  I agree with you about b/p and g/k, so perhaps that is a matter of opinion, or just a way of expressing that although 'b' is similar to an English 'b' it is not the same.  However, the way I say the 'j' 'q' 'x' 'zh', was always either causing words to be misunderstood or just pointed out as being a very poor Chinese accent.  She is right in that the tapes (nor her own native accent) don't sound much like my attempts either.  She also said that Mandarin speakers from some other parts of China don't distinguish those consonants the way northern speakers do.  I am a native English speaker, and I have not travelled to China myself, I am afraid. --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 14:54, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Pinyin is expressly for Mandarin. The "Beijing dialect" that you speak of is simply Mandarin. Mandarin is the official language of China, thus, pinyin is a romanized pronunciation for Mandarin.

external resource missing
There is an excellent non-profit website which specializes in educating the public about Hanyu Pinyin, and it should definitely be in the external links list here, but I don't know how to add it because I don't understand the code for the external links. Here is the info: http://www.pinyin.info/

I am very well versed in pinyin, so I can vouch for its quality and the fact that it is not spam. Could someone please help add it? Thanks, Dragonbones 15:41, 11 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Done. &minus;Woodstone 19:14, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Mysterious /ɰ/ Phoneme in Standard Mandarin Article
Would someone please take a look at my Talk question "This Phoneme /ɰ/ is Misclassified, and Does it Really Exist?" in the Standard Mandarin article.

They have a mystery phoneme in their chart there that is not present in the Romanization charts in the Pinyin article here: /ɰ/ —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 75.7.2.131 (talk) 13:26, 7 December 2006 (UTC).

Good Article Review
A Good Article review has opened concerning this article concerning these issues at WP:GA/R, please address them in 7 days or the article will be delisted: maintenance of the article has fallen, there are 3 citation needed tags, only one reference, only one note and one spam notice. Rlevse 00:25, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * delisted as a GA, no action taken on above.Rlevse 23:14, 18 December 2006 (UTC)