PINYIN By Danielle Hochstetter
Danielle Hochstetter moved to China in 2007 with a desire to learn Mandarin and drink lots of delicious tea. In 2011, she entered the tea department at Zhejiang University as a master’s candidate and graduated in June 2014. She is now drinking lots of delicious tea in the Bay area. Danielle was asked why there are so many different names and spellings for all the Chinese teas? What is Pinyin? |
The short answer: the switch from the Wade-Giles system to Pinyin in the 70s, the continued use of some spellings older than Wade-Giles, and a lack of Pinyin education among the Chinese.
The long answer: (after all, you are on the internet, aren’t you?)
As you probably know, the written Chinese language is vastly different from most languages, because it is made up of “symbols” or characters, as they are called. You have to know 1500-2000 of these characters to be considered literate. Many well-educated Chinese know many thousands more.
The writing system sounds complicated, but actually, that is not what creates confusion in Chinese tea names when written in English. Errors arise as a result of ill use of Pinyin, dialects, and a certain amount of lazy thinking.
If you know what Pinyin is, skip this paragraph. If you don’t, don’t. Let’s take one Chinese character, 这。This character means “this” pretty much everywhere in China. But it is not pronounced the same all over China. In some places it’s like ‘jar’ in some it’s like ‘tzuh.’ So a few hundreds of years ago when foreign missionaries, merchants, and a few eccentric travellers disguised as one of the above came to China and tried to record the language, all sorts of crazy systems of writing down the language in their own alphabet were born. You might have heard about how the word for tea in different languages is either a root of Fujianese dialect (tea, tee, te, etc) or a descendent of the Mandarin word (cha, chai, chay, etc). That should give you an idea of how different dialects can influence how a word ends up getting written in English. But I am supposed to be describing Pinyin, not dialects.
So you have this lovely character “这” and you want to know how to say it. You should really use the pronunciation they use in Beijing and the north in general, because it’s really much nicer sounding than the southern dialects. Oh, and also that’s where the emperor lives, the government is based, the son of heaven receives his mandate, etc, etc.
And that’s what Thomas Francis Wade did. He developed a system of writing Chinese characters in English that worked. Or at least it was marginally better than other systems of writing Chinese characters out there. Writing Chinese characters with the English alphabet, by the way, is called romanization. And it’s a very important tool if your mother tongue is English, French, German, Spanish, etc and you want to learn a language they speak in China, be it Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, etc. A good system of romanization, and learning it well, enables you to leap frog your way to being able to learn whole sentences in a few weeks or study, instead of being stuck on learning your 50th character and still being unable to ask for water.
So Wade came up with a system of romanization. About 50 years later, Herbert Giles made some changes to Wade’s system and the resulting system was called….. Wade-Giles! Some features of the system include the liberal use of apostrophes, the existence of both ‘chi’ and ‘ch’i,’ and the use of hyphens to separate syllables within a word, i.e. pu-erh.
This system ruled for a while, and some vestiges of it are still around. But, in the end, it was conquered by the wonderful, consistent, and relatively easy-to-learn system now known as Pinyin.
Pinyin does not use hyphens. Apostrophes are only used in select circumstances that make perfect sense once you learn the system. I will admit, there are a few problem letters. Namely, the q and x. (q is like ‘ch’ but with lots of air and x is similar to ‘sh.’) But once you learn how letters are pronounced in Pinyin, there are no special tricks and rules to learn like there are in English. It is a wonderful tool for learning how to pronounce Chinese characters. It is also the proper tool to use when we wish to write, in English, the name of something that has a perfectly good name in Chinese.
In the Wikipedia entry on Pinyin, someone has written, about early books on romanization, “Neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese.” I would argue that Pinyin, and romanization in general, has still not had much of an “impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system…” and are still mainly for people wishing to learn Chinese languages. Chinese people all learn Pinyin early on in elementary school, but as students learn hundreds, then thousands of characters, Pinyin takes a back seat to communication purely in characters. This distinction is important because there is sometimes tension between the Pinyin system and dialects. For example, in Zhejiang, people often do not differentiate between syllables ending in -n and -ng. So, ‘lin’ and ‘ling’ are pronounced the same (as are ‘shen’ and ‘sheng,’ ‘yin’ and ‘ying,’ and ‘qin’ and ‘qing.’) When you have the characters to reference, you can eliminate any confusion that might come up, but if you ask someone from Zhejiang to convert one of these characters into Pinyin, he or she will be faced with the question of how the character should be spelled in Pinyin, i.e. whether or not to add a ‘g.’ And sometimes, they will simply make an educated, but wrong, guess, and errors are born. Alternatively, many Chinese don’t know when to add a space and capitalise the next syllable. Written Chinese does not have spaces, so when faced with the prospect of having to insert spaces in Pinyin, many work off the same principle as spelling in Pinyin- guess! For example, the town of Hangzhou suddenly becomes Hang Zhou or Hang-zhou in the hands of those who are unclear about how to render the name of a place in Pinyin. Just remember that Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu are all just one word in Pinyin, with no hyphens. So if you have to write the name of a tea from Xihu, Yixing, or Alishan, just remember to follow the model set by Beijing/Shanghai.
The above mentioned guesswork can result in a common tea like Hangzhou’s Xihu Longjing becoming Xi Hu Long Jing, Xi-Hu Long-Jin, Xi-hu Long-jing, or any other imaginative spelling by an uninformed Chinese or American tea vendor. Longjing is also problematic, because its Wade-Giles spelling, Lung Ching, is also still commonplace.
Going back to the time before Wade developed his system of romanization, other foreigners established certain spellings for place names and some teas that we still use today, like Peking and Canton, Keemun, Bohea, Oolong and Lapsang Souchong. These names come from local dialects and romanization systems no longer in use, and don’t follow any patterns established in Pinyin or Wade-Giles. Although these names have been used consistently over the decades and their pronunciation is generally known, their irregularity may contribute to overall confusion. Also, when vendors try to “update” their line and spell Keemun as Qimen, or Oolong as Wulong, both the proper Pinyin spellings, it can lead to more confusion among consumers. Below is a list of some common misspellings or simply older spellings and their equivalent in Pinyin:
Keemun or Qimen, Chunmee or Zhenmei, Pu-erh or Pu’er, Lung Ching or Longjing,
Oolong or Wulong, Tikwanyin or Tieguanyin.
For more info about Pinyin, I highly recommend the wonderful resource Pinyin Info (http://www.pinyin.info/)
I also recommend you enjoy great tea, even if the packaging says ‘Hang-Zhou Xi hu Lung-Jin.’
The long answer: (after all, you are on the internet, aren’t you?)
As you probably know, the written Chinese language is vastly different from most languages, because it is made up of “symbols” or characters, as they are called. You have to know 1500-2000 of these characters to be considered literate. Many well-educated Chinese know many thousands more.
The writing system sounds complicated, but actually, that is not what creates confusion in Chinese tea names when written in English. Errors arise as a result of ill use of Pinyin, dialects, and a certain amount of lazy thinking.
If you know what Pinyin is, skip this paragraph. If you don’t, don’t. Let’s take one Chinese character, 这。This character means “this” pretty much everywhere in China. But it is not pronounced the same all over China. In some places it’s like ‘jar’ in some it’s like ‘tzuh.’ So a few hundreds of years ago when foreign missionaries, merchants, and a few eccentric travellers disguised as one of the above came to China and tried to record the language, all sorts of crazy systems of writing down the language in their own alphabet were born. You might have heard about how the word for tea in different languages is either a root of Fujianese dialect (tea, tee, te, etc) or a descendent of the Mandarin word (cha, chai, chay, etc). That should give you an idea of how different dialects can influence how a word ends up getting written in English. But I am supposed to be describing Pinyin, not dialects.
So you have this lovely character “这” and you want to know how to say it. You should really use the pronunciation they use in Beijing and the north in general, because it’s really much nicer sounding than the southern dialects. Oh, and also that’s where the emperor lives, the government is based, the son of heaven receives his mandate, etc, etc.
And that’s what Thomas Francis Wade did. He developed a system of writing Chinese characters in English that worked. Or at least it was marginally better than other systems of writing Chinese characters out there. Writing Chinese characters with the English alphabet, by the way, is called romanization. And it’s a very important tool if your mother tongue is English, French, German, Spanish, etc and you want to learn a language they speak in China, be it Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, etc. A good system of romanization, and learning it well, enables you to leap frog your way to being able to learn whole sentences in a few weeks or study, instead of being stuck on learning your 50th character and still being unable to ask for water.
So Wade came up with a system of romanization. About 50 years later, Herbert Giles made some changes to Wade’s system and the resulting system was called….. Wade-Giles! Some features of the system include the liberal use of apostrophes, the existence of both ‘chi’ and ‘ch’i,’ and the use of hyphens to separate syllables within a word, i.e. pu-erh.
This system ruled for a while, and some vestiges of it are still around. But, in the end, it was conquered by the wonderful, consistent, and relatively easy-to-learn system now known as Pinyin.
Pinyin does not use hyphens. Apostrophes are only used in select circumstances that make perfect sense once you learn the system. I will admit, there are a few problem letters. Namely, the q and x. (q is like ‘ch’ but with lots of air and x is similar to ‘sh.’) But once you learn how letters are pronounced in Pinyin, there are no special tricks and rules to learn like there are in English. It is a wonderful tool for learning how to pronounce Chinese characters. It is also the proper tool to use when we wish to write, in English, the name of something that has a perfectly good name in Chinese.
In the Wikipedia entry on Pinyin, someone has written, about early books on romanization, “Neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese.” I would argue that Pinyin, and romanization in general, has still not had much of an “impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system…” and are still mainly for people wishing to learn Chinese languages. Chinese people all learn Pinyin early on in elementary school, but as students learn hundreds, then thousands of characters, Pinyin takes a back seat to communication purely in characters. This distinction is important because there is sometimes tension between the Pinyin system and dialects. For example, in Zhejiang, people often do not differentiate between syllables ending in -n and -ng. So, ‘lin’ and ‘ling’ are pronounced the same (as are ‘shen’ and ‘sheng,’ ‘yin’ and ‘ying,’ and ‘qin’ and ‘qing.’) When you have the characters to reference, you can eliminate any confusion that might come up, but if you ask someone from Zhejiang to convert one of these characters into Pinyin, he or she will be faced with the question of how the character should be spelled in Pinyin, i.e. whether or not to add a ‘g.’ And sometimes, they will simply make an educated, but wrong, guess, and errors are born. Alternatively, many Chinese don’t know when to add a space and capitalise the next syllable. Written Chinese does not have spaces, so when faced with the prospect of having to insert spaces in Pinyin, many work off the same principle as spelling in Pinyin- guess! For example, the town of Hangzhou suddenly becomes Hang Zhou or Hang-zhou in the hands of those who are unclear about how to render the name of a place in Pinyin. Just remember that Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu are all just one word in Pinyin, with no hyphens. So if you have to write the name of a tea from Xihu, Yixing, or Alishan, just remember to follow the model set by Beijing/Shanghai.
The above mentioned guesswork can result in a common tea like Hangzhou’s Xihu Longjing becoming Xi Hu Long Jing, Xi-Hu Long-Jin, Xi-hu Long-jing, or any other imaginative spelling by an uninformed Chinese or American tea vendor. Longjing is also problematic, because its Wade-Giles spelling, Lung Ching, is also still commonplace.
Going back to the time before Wade developed his system of romanization, other foreigners established certain spellings for place names and some teas that we still use today, like Peking and Canton, Keemun, Bohea, Oolong and Lapsang Souchong. These names come from local dialects and romanization systems no longer in use, and don’t follow any patterns established in Pinyin or Wade-Giles. Although these names have been used consistently over the decades and their pronunciation is generally known, their irregularity may contribute to overall confusion. Also, when vendors try to “update” their line and spell Keemun as Qimen, or Oolong as Wulong, both the proper Pinyin spellings, it can lead to more confusion among consumers. Below is a list of some common misspellings or simply older spellings and their equivalent in Pinyin:
Keemun or Qimen, Chunmee or Zhenmei, Pu-erh or Pu’er, Lung Ching or Longjing,
Oolong or Wulong, Tikwanyin or Tieguanyin.
For more info about Pinyin, I highly recommend the wonderful resource Pinyin Info (http://www.pinyin.info/)
I also recommend you enjoy great tea, even if the packaging says ‘Hang-Zhou Xi hu Lung-Jin.’