CZ Talk:Romanization/Chinese

Tone marks

The problem with tone marks is that most people won't know what they mean, or how to interpret them. To hope that we will get correct pronunciation out of our Romanization scheme is, I think, 'a bridge too far'. There's a similar discussion over at CZ Talk:Romanization/Ancient Greek. I think the best we can hope for is 'ability to recognize this place-name/personal-name in other written works', along with 'not too horribly mangled when spoken'. J. Noel Chiappa 12:11, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

I'm suggesting that the tone be shown on the first instance of the words use. The aim is not perfect pronunciation, but rather readability. Without tone marks, the meaning of the transliterated text may be confusing and ambiguous or worse, completely meaningless. Chinese cannot be compared to Greek. Tone marks are not the same as western accents and cannot be considered in the same way. Tone marks in Chinese are not simply an aid to correct pronunciation. Rather, tone is the fundamental aspect of the language. Derek Harkness 19:53, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

I know that. (A good friend in my research group at MIT, a lady from Harbin, tried to teach me how to say her name correctly, including the tones - not sure how well she suceeded!) Can you re-read my comments above with that bit of data in hand?

For instance (getting back to the point I was trying to get across), most English-language works on Chinese topics, even specialist ones printed in China/Taiwan (I have a large library on a variety of Chinese art forms which interest me) omit tone marks on transliterated Chinese terms. Even though I know quite about about some aspects of Chinese culture and history, I can't read or use tone marks, which ought to be an indicator of how useful they will be for the vast majority of our readers.

The point of the post in the Greek talk page was that almost all readers, other than those who are actually learning the language, will find the various special symbols used in writing words in the foreign language in Roman script to be of no value, and will not be able to use them to improve their pronunciation.

Not that I object to including them in the first use (if the person writing the article knows them, or can figure out how to look them up) - just don't get your hopes up that it will produce better pronunciation in 99.8% of cases than just the straight Romanization (and that's not being sarcastic, that's a genuine attempt at a solid guess). J. Noel Chiappa 21:04, 13 May 2008 (CDT)

While to most people, the tones are meaningless, do they cause a problem? While the number of people who would find them useful is limited, to that group of people the tone marks are very useful. Why disadvantage those people without any gain to any others? Take a look at the introduction of Anshan. Are the tone mark there actually a problem?

It should not be a hindrance to authors either. This is a wiki, you put up the information you have, someone else will add more information later. If you don't know a tone for a word, put up the bit you do know. Later it can be updated. These are guidelines that the wiki works towards rather than prerequisites for writing anything. Derek Harkness 06:52, 14 May 2008 (CDT)

Well, I did say "[n]ot that I object to including them"!

As long as the document makes clear that it's perfectly fine to include the romanization without tone marks if you don't know it; and in fact that we'd rather have the romanization without tone marks, than no romanization at all, that's what's most important, I think.

Oh, one other idea - what we typically do in Japanese articles is write the term in 'plain' romanization, followed by the original characters, and then the 'fancy' romanization, e.g. "Junichiro Koizumi (小泉 純一郎, Koizumi Jun'ichirō)"; this also allows us to give the name in Asian order. You could do something similar, so in you example it could be "Anshan (鞍山, Ānshān)". Do you think that would be good? J. Noel Chiappa 11:32, 14 May 2008 (CDT)