Wrists still in pain but dammit this thread has been eating my brain lately so I'm gonna try

might be slow on replies though

I've seen increasing concern on getting romanization "right" (esp of Asian languages, esp from writers). Good! Respect diversity! Do research!

Only.... yeah, looking up is good. But scratch past the surface & this rabbit hole is deeper than that weird-ass swimming pool in Poland

okay THREAD

First of all, what is romanization? It's writing words with the A-Z Roman alphabet -- the one English uses -- for a language that uses a different writing system. Frex Chinese or Japanese

Is romanization the same thing as pinyin? Nope! Pinyin is a *particular* standard romanization for *Mandarin* Chinese

And by standard, I mean what Beijing has decided (we'll come back to this)

Pinyin is only for Mandarin; it's built for the Mandarin phonemes. It doesn't even make sense to talk about writing a different Chinese topolect with pinyin; there are other romanizations for them

Lots of other languages have a standard romanization, for example Japan's standard romanization is called romaji.

So you might think, just look that up, and that's the "right" one. Here's where it starts getting FUN

Romanization is in some sense papered over the language. Although it's not quite right to think of it entirely as imposed colonizing forces either, in the sense that my understanding is Chinese schools now use pinyin to teach young kids, or for intersection with tech... etc...

But otoh this is not true of Japanese schools at all & my Japanese phone was in hiragana only. So it really varies. And generations ago, my dad did not learn on pinyin at all, he learned on a non-Roman phonetic system, and my uncle had a radical/stroke keyboard rather than an IME

So you can see already that the use of romanization in-country varies widely by country, language, and culture -- and for languages like Chinese, LOTS of countries use it that aren't China! And they DON'T all do what China does

Just for example, Taiwan does NOT consider Pinyin its standard. (And I believe has a few competing romanizations in use.... Not sure of the specifics.)

But even if we focus JUST on Mandarin and JUST on mainland China, the pinyin system is very recent. It was invented by Chinese linguists in the 1950s

Before that there were other Mandarin romanizations.... that are still mixed in today!

Let's examine a tip of this iceberg via loanwords, some of which entered English in an older or nonstandard way. Two easy food examples are tempura and Peking duck

Tempura is a Japanese example not Chinese, obviously ;)

Anyway the romaji for tempura is actually "tenpura". But write it this way and no one knows what you're talking about

Interestingly, "tempura" isn't mispronunciation--acc to my Japanese friends, ん in Japanese doesn't map exactly to N, but can be N or M or some NG-ish thing I'm bad at (I think? My pronunciation is very not great lol)

It's maybe phonemes not matching 1 to 1 & the tangle of how language develops... @estarianne in my mentions also says that this is actually a standard romanization of ん before P or B, which I didn't know! (My romaji is WEAK! Don't need it to speak Japanese!)

Now for Peking duck -- that's not the American name for it, it's the translation for the Chinese name for it. It's called Beijing duck in China too, the same way we say Manhattan clam chowder

Only, we don't say Beijing duck in English, we say Peking duck. Peking is the Wade-Giles romanization of.... Beijing! But it was supposed to be pronounced exactly the same way, with P pronounced as B and K pronounced as J

Kind of like how in the pinyin romanization, Q is pronounced as CH and X is pronounced as SH (sorta) -- it was just the decision made as to which letters represent what. Peking IS Beijing. It's not an "old" name for the same city, it's the SAME name -- China didn't change it

We just changed how we wrote that same Chinese word's transliteration *in English*

Ofc most Anglophones don't know this so pronounce it Pee-Kkking. Including Peking duck. So if you're a writer & you've got a character, how will they think of it?

Well, depends. If they speak only English, prob Peking duck! If they're bilingual? Who knows? Depends on the context

Wades-Giles & other romanizations also pop up all over in Chinese names. Especially looking at generational immigration

If you know your linguistic history, you might be able to tell (1) where someone immigrated from (2) what generation they came to an Anglophone country, purely from how they romanize their Chinese family name

For example, the same name is romanized Chung in Wade-Giles but Zhong in Pinyin, same with Hsu versus Xu (same name, different romanizations)

Etc etc etc and THAT'S ONLY MANDARIN TOO

And now we get to diaspora families, like mine. And I can tell you from experience.... whoooo WHEE do we romanize inconsistently! At least in my generation

My name on my birth certificate is from no standard romanization ever. The English letters for it are ENTIRELY MADE UP

Is that wrong? Nope, of course not!

As a kid, my family would write the Chinese words we used using all kinds of creative (but generally internally consistent) spellings, whether they were food or familial relation terms or whatever

Again, not "wrong" at all! Our real lives is all

Oh oh oh and I promised we'd come back to the "pinyin was standardized by Beijing" thing. When I say "Beijing" here I mean it as metonymy for the PRC government

The PRC has, over the years, engaged in absolutely vile language oppression over the Sinosphere, particularly in regions it considers to be within its borders (like Hong Kong and Tibet)

Even if those regions do not historically speak Mandarin

Beijing's Chinese is said to be "standard", but it also uses every one of its language "standards" in language oppression against other regions

So like, yes, you can look up the proper pinyin for something. But is that "right"? Well. WELL. *gestures at all the above*

In some sense, yes, the standard romanized spelling is "right". In another sense, there is no "right", there's only standard. In fact it's sometimes much more right to be NONstandard, depending on your context!

(An easy example is to always spell people's names the way they want!)

But this also isn't an excuse for not doing any research. Because it's also very very easy to be nonstandard and be totally WRONG (for the context you're in). You really gotta know if you wanna play.

I'd say the 101 is to look it up. The 102 is to start understanding the wildly broad and deep context romanization happens in, and what cultural and other factors impact it.

Me, I've used standard pinyin spellings in Anglophone writing sometimes, and sometimes I've purposely fucked it all up. The spellings in Burning Roses are pinyin, but I did the spacing in a nonstandard but not unheard-of way....

...and nobody's tried to police me about it YET, but if someone did, yanno. *waves at entire thread* (and yup, I did discuss it with my editor.)

So there's a basic introduction to the complexity of romanization for ya! Hope you enjoyed! And I hope this gives English-speakers a little perspective on the idea of romanization being "right", and how complex that can be. ;)