Transcription
and Pronunciation of Mandarin Chinese
Q: "Dr. Wheeler,
one book I have read spells Taoism as Daoism. Which
spelling is correct?"
A: "They both
are."
Q: "Which way
do I pronounce it?"
A: "Somewhere
between the two."
Often, the sounds used in other languages
do not match exactly with those used in English. For instance,
in the English, the capital of China is sometimes written as Beijing
and sometimes as Peking. Both refer to the same city, they
are just two different attempts to "transcribe" or "transliterate"
the Mandarin sounds into compatible or comparable English ones.
In other cases, Chinese words like Ku Li (modern English
"Coolie") are fairly easy to transliterate.
The Italian Jesuit called Matteo Ricci
founded the first major Catholic mission in China (1583-1610).
He first transcribed Mandarin into the Roman (European) alphabet.
Since his day, linguists have engaged in some two dozen or more
attempts or more to reduce Chinese sounds into readily understandable
equivalents in Western languages. The problem is compounded by
the fact that the original Chinese texts represent words by using
some tens of thousands of separate pictograms. For a long time,
three systems of European transcription predominated.
These three European systems are:
- the Wade (or Wade-Giles) system used
in America and Britain
- the Ecole Français de l'Extême-Orient
used in France
- the Lessing system used in Germany
Since 1958, the Chinese themselves have
struggled to create one single phonetic transcription using the
Lessing system, which they call hanyu pinyin fang'an
("Scheme for a Chinese Phonetic Alphabet"). Most
scholars refer to it briefly as pinyin, and since
January 1, 1979, all foreign language books published in China
have used the pinyin system, and it is now being taught
in public Chinese schools using the standard Chinese characters.
However, many of the primary scholarly
reference books printed in America and Europe still use the Wade-Giles
system: Derk Bodde's Essays on Chinese Civilisation,
William Hinton's sociological study Fanshen and Shenfan,
Twitchett and Loewe's Cambridge History of China, Joseph
Needham's Science and Civilization in China, Fairbank
and Reischauer's China, Tradition, and Transformation,
Jacques Gernet's A History of Chinese Civilization, Hucker's
China's Imperial Past, and Sickman and Soper's The
Art and Architecture of China, to name but a few.
To figure out how to pronounce a word using
the Wade-Giles system, the following may serve as a rough guide,
as I have reproduced here from Edgar Snow's The Other Side
of the River, David Wingrove's authorial notes to his fiction
series Chung Kuo, and the student reference book, Chinese
Vocabulary: An Introduction.
CONFUSING MANDARIN CONSONANTS:
Chi is pronounced like English
Gee!
Ch'i sounds like "Chee."
For instance, Ch'in is exactly like English chin.
Chu is roughly the same as English
Jew, as in Chu Teh ("Jew Duhr").
Ch'u is pronounced like chew
in English.
Tsung is pronounced "dzung,"
Ts'ung is prounced like the ts
in Patsy or tse-tse fly
Tai sounds like the English die.
T'ai sounds like the English
tie.
Pai sounds like the English buy.
P'ai sounds like the English
pie.
Kung is like "Gung"
(as in Gung a Din).
K'ung with the apostrophe has
a k that sounds like the k in kind.
J is the equivalent of r,
but it is slurred as in "rrrrun."
H before an s, as in hsi,
is the equivalent of an aspirant but it is often dropped (Sian
for Hsian, etc.)
CONFUSING MANDARIN VOWELS:
Vowels in Chinese are generally short
or medium, not long and flat. Thus, Tang sounds like
"dong," never like the drink that American
astronauts imbibe. "T'ang" is pronounced
"tong."
a--as the a in father
e--as the u in run
eh--as the e in hen
i--as the vowel in see
ih--as the e in her
o--as the vowel in look
ou--as the vowel in go
u--as the vowel in soon.
Does all this seem overwhelming? Have patience
and you will master it! Remember the wonderfully alliterative
Chinese proverb:
Chih
yao yu heng hsin t'ieh ch'u mo ch'eng chen....
If only
there is persistence, even an iron pillar will be ground into
a needle....
