Tongyong Pinyin Totally Explained

Everything about Tongyong Pinyin totally explained

Tongyong Pinyin is the current official romanization of Mandarin Chinese in the Republic of China. ROC's Ministry of Education approved the system in 2002 but its use isn't mandatory.

History

The impetus behind the invention of Tongyong Pinyin came from the need for a standardized romanization system in Taiwan. For decades the island had employed various systems, usually simplifications or adaptations of Wade-Giles. (Zhuyin fuhao, a standard phonetic system for language education in Taiwan's schools, doesn't employ the Latin alphabet.)
   Tourists, expatriates and immigrants in Taiwan most often use English when they're not familiar with Mandarin. The Hanyu Pinyin system, the system used in China and by the UN, offers strengths as a consistent phonetic system for Mandarin but has serious shortcomings in helping speakers with no training pronounce Mandarin words reliably (says who?). The sounds Hanyu Pinyin assigns to the letters Q and X, for example, are not idiomatic in the languages of most users of the Roman alphabet. Tongyong Pinyin represents an effort to preserve the strengths of the pinyin system while overcoming some of these difficulties.
   The majority of Taiwan natives don't speak Mandarin as their mother tongue. The first language most individuals learn as children is Taiwanese. This language, unwritten until the nineteenth century, has historically lacked a consistent means of phonetic representation. The same situation exists with the mother tongues spoken by sizable minorities in Taiwan, such as Hakka and aboriginal peoples. The languages and literature of these people is a subject of study and education in Taiwan, and many place names (including the word Taiwan itself) are derived from languages other than Mandarin. Tongyong Pinyin thus represents an effort to provide a phonetic romanization system for Mandarin that, with very little modification, could be used to represent Taiwanese and other languages of the island. Tongyong Pinyin was introduced in Taiwan in 1998 by Yu Bor-chuan (余伯泉). The goal was to preserve the strengths of pinyin while overcoming some of the pronunciation difficulties Hanyu Pinyin presents to international readers. Ironically, using the system he developed to ameliorate this problem, most international readers will pronounce the second character of his name incorrectly as "bore." Yu's system has undergone some subsequent revision.
   Discussion and adoption of Tongyong Pinyin, like many other initiatives in Taiwan, quickly acquired a partisan cast turning on issues of national identity. Officials who identified most strongly with the island itself, such as the DPP and allied parties, saw no reason to adopt Hanyu Pinyin just because China and the UN had. If Tongyong Pinyin more adequately met the island's needs, Taiwan had reason enough to adopt it. Officials who identified more strongly with Chinese culture, such as the KMT, saw no reason to introduce a new system unique to Taiwan if Hanyu Pinyin had already gained international acceptance. Each side accused the other of basing its preference on anti-China or pro-China sentiment rather than an objective discussion of community goals.
   In early October 2000 the Mandarin Commission of the Ministry of Education proposed to use Tongyong Pinyin as the national standard. Education Minister Ovid Tzeng (曾志朗) submitted a draft of the Taiwanese Romanization in late October to the Executive Yuan but the proposal was rejected. In November 2000 Minister Tzeng suggested the government adopt Hanyu Pinyin with some modifications for local dialects, but the proposal was rejected. On 10 July 2002 Taiwan's Ministry of Education held a meeting for 27 members. Only 13 attended. Two left early, plus the chairman couldn't vote, so the bill for using Tongyong Pinyin was passed by ten votes. In August 2002 the government adopted Tongyong Pinyin through an administrative order which local governments have the authority to override within their jurisdiction.
   With the KMT's legislative and presidential electoral victories in 2008, Tongyong Pinyin may be replaced by Hanyu Pinyin as the ROC government standard.

Adoption

Tongyong Pinyin is thus the official romanization system in Taiwan but its use is voluntary. The romanization system one encounters in Taiwan varies according to which government authority administers the facility. Street signs in most areas employ Tongyong Pinyin, including Kaohsiung City, Tainan City, Taichung City and neighboring counties. Taipei City uses Hanyu Pinyin exclusively. Taipei County uses Hanyu Pinyin with Tongyong Pinyin given in parentheses. Modified Wade-Giles spellings are still popularly used for many proper names, especially personal names and businesses.
The political impasse stalled Ministry of Education goals of replacing zhuyin with pinyin to teach pronunciation in elementary school. Zhuyin is still widely used to teach Mandarin pronunciation to schoolchildren. Children's books published in Taiwan typically display zhuyin characters next to Chinese characters in the text.

Taiwanese language variant

The Tongyong Pinyin system also exists in a Taiwanese phonetic symbol version (台語音標版) which lacks the letter f but adds the letter v (for 万). On September 28, 2006, the Ministry of Education rejected the use of Tongyong Pinyin for the Taiwanese dialect in favor of Pe̍h-ōe-jī (台羅版拼音).(External Link

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Features

Spelling

Notable features of Tongyong Pinyin are:

Tone 1 is unmarked.
Hanyu zh- becomes jh- (Wade-Giles uses ch-).
Hanyu x- and q- are completely unused in Tongyong Pinyin: they become s- and c- (Wade-Giles uses hs- and ch-).
The Hanyu -i (not represented in zhuyin) known as the empty rime (空韻), are shown as -ih (partially like Wade-Giles), i.e, those in Hanyu as zi (資), ci (慈), si (思), zhi (知), chi (吃), shi (詩), and ri (日) all end in -ih in Tongyong.
ü used in pinyin (written u after j, q and x) is replaced by yu.
-eng becomes ong after f- and w- (奉、瓮)
wen (溫) becomes wun
-iong becomes yong, for example syong instead of pinyin xiong (兇). (Cf. -iang remains unchanged: siang).
Unlike Wade-Giles and Hanyu, -iu and -ui [for example,liu (六) and gui (鬼)] contractions can be optionally written out in full as -iou and -uei. However, according to the Ministry of the Interior, in romanizations of names of places that's at township-level or below township-level, the letters must be written in full.

Punctuation

Tongyong syllables in the same word (except placenames) are to be separated by hyphens, like Wade-Giles. Except that, in Ministry of the Interior's romanizations, placenames have no spaces between the syllables.

Tongyong uses tone marks like zhuyin, and not like Hanyu, for example, Tongyong has no mark for the first tone, but a dot for the neutral tone (which is optional on computers).

The optional syllable disambiguity mark is apostrophe (like Hanyu), for example, ji'nan vs. jin'an. The mark may also, as in the Ministry of the Interior placenames, be a hyphen.

Shared Features with Hanyu

Ignoring tone, 80.53% of the Tongyong Pinyin syllables are spelled identically to those of Hanyu Pinyin; 19.47% are spelled differently. The difference widens when syllables are measured according to average frequency of use in everyday life, resulting in a 48.84% difference in spellings.(External Link

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Arguments

The prevalence of Hanyu Pinyin as an established system weighs at least as heavily on the debate over Tongyong Pinyin as any feature of the system itself. Arguments presented in the ongoing debate include these.

Supporting Tongyong Pinyin

Intrinsic

Tongyong spelling, by design, yields more accurate pronunciation from non-Chinese speakers than does Hanyu Pinyin. Tongyong doesn't use the letters q and x, for example, in idiosyncratic ways that confuse non-Chinese speakers who lack training in the system.(External Link

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Persons familiar with Hanyu Pinyin will encounter nothing radically different when using Tongyong Pinyin.

Tongyong eliminates the need for diacritics for the umlauted-u sound.

The spellings "fong" and "wong" more accurately reflect the sounds of 風 and 翁 as pronounced in Standard Mandarin in Taiwan, as compared to "feng" and "weng".

Practical

Tongyong is business-friendly because of the ease it offers in pronunciation. Internationals in Taiwan may more easily describe and find place names, personal names, businesses and locales.

Tongyong Pinyin requires no more special accommodation in international correspondence than the difference in Chinese characters (Simplified, Traditional) already requires.

Tongyong strikes a balance between the need for internationalization and Taiwan's local needs.(External Link

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Tongyong Pinyin wouldn't supplant Hanyu Pinyin in Taiwan, as Hanyu is rarely encountered outside the Taipei area anyway and has never been in common use. Tongyong is intended to supplant the many variants of Wade-Giles which remain the dominant form of romanization encountered in Taiwan. No one questions the superiority of Tongyong Pinyin to Wade-Giles and the benefit to be gained from the change.

Tongyong doesn't force its exclusive use on those who have already studied Hanyu. One can use any system one wishes in rendering characters while typing or formatting documents in Mandarin. Computers and electronic devices in Taiwan already offer Hanyu Pinyin and MPS keyboards as options. Transitions between romanized forms are also easily achieved if needed.

Romanization is most useful to individuals who, lacking training in Mandarin, encounter names and terms in press reports and literature. Students of Mandarin gain literacy in Chinese characters and drop romanization systems of any kind. It therefore makes sense, if one can preserve other goals, to make a priority of enabling confident first-time pronunciation of Mandarin words by the untrained.

Against Tongyong Pinyin

Intrinsic

Hanyu Pinyin romanization includes fewer phonological rules in its systematization than Tongyong Pinyin, albeit at the expense of requiring more phonemes. This may be seen in the Tongyong Pinyin treatment of the letters c and s. /c/ --> tʃ _i /s/ --> ʃ _i
[Thesepalatalization rules are common in many languages, including Italian (ciao) and English (Asia). In each case, the consonant is softened (palatalized) to the corresponding palato-alveolar (or alveolar-palatal, in the case of Mandarin) affricate and fricative). So including a few extra phonological rules, rather than introducing new phonemes, can't simply be dismissed as a bad trade-off. Other considerations have to be judged and weighed before arriving at that conclusion].

Internal inconsistencies exist within Tongyong Pinyin, such as the use of different letters to represent the same sound: e vs. u (ben, pen, fen & men but wun) and i vs. y (ciang but cyong); or the use of the same letter to represent different sounds (s, c and z each representing both a dental and a palatal sibilant). [Thefirst objection is a consequence of the fact that approximants such as /j/ (rendered as 'y') and /w/ are treated as semi-vowels in some phonologies, functioning as vowels /i/ and /u/. The discovery that they're not "consistent" assumes that these approximants should function the same as other consonants. The second objection only indicates that Tongyong Pinyin systematization creates more allophones than Hanyu Pinyin].

Every Mandarin syllable can be expressed in equal or fewer keystrokes in Hanyu Pinyin compared to Tongyong Pinyin (External Link). [Again,this is because Hanyu Pinyin introduces more phonemes, and ignores the fact that some are in complementary distribution].

Despite the fact that 19.47% of Tongyong syllables are spelled differently from Hanyu Pinyin, if measured according to average frequency of word use in everyday life, the percentage of different spellings is 48.84%.(External Link) Practical

The standard romanization system of the PRC, ISO and UN is Hanyu Pinyin. For this reason it's the system taught in educational systems outside of Taiwan. Internationals learning Mandarin thus have to learn Hanyu Pinyin anyway. Whatever the merits of a new system, it's unlikely to displace Hanyu Pinyin at this level.

Any new system of romanization, regardless of its merits, makes romanization choices more complex rather than more simple. New spellings are introduced where established spellings already exist and even compete. "Qing Dynasty" (Hanyu) and "Ch'ing Dynasty" (Wade-Giles) can now also be spelled as "Cing Dynasty" (Tongyong). "Zhou Dynasty" (Hanyu) or "Chou Dynasty" (Wade-Giles) can now also be spelled as "Jhou Dynasty" (Tongyong).

The use of Tongyong or Hanyu in Taiwan appears tied to too heavily to the fortunes of specific political parties. Given the situation, why not just default to the system everyone else is already using?

Hanyu Pinyin is more business-friendly because businesses already use it.

Tongyong Pinyin is currently more useful to visitors and tourists who are unfamiliar with Mandarin than to residents who have to learn Mandarin. Because Tongyong hasn't been adopted for language learning in Taiwan's schools, most natives of Taiwan continue to use other romanization methods (usually modified Wade-Giles). Expats and immigrants who study Chinese generally have to learn Hanyu Pinyin.

Unlike the PRC, where citizens are taught Hanyu Pinyin in schools, Tongyong romanization isn't taught in the general educational curriculum. As a result, few citizens of Taiwan ever use it. Given the fact that overseas learners of Mandarin are not taught Tongyong Pinyin either, there are few people in the world who use it in any practical sense. In other words, if locals don't use it and foreigners don't use it, why promote it?
Comparison chart

Further Information
Get more info on 'Tongyong Pinyin'.

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