Tongyong Pinyin
Tongyong Pinyin () is the current official
romanization of the
Chinese language adopted by the national government (although not all local governments) of
Taiwan since late
2000, announced by the
Mandarin Promotion Council of the
Ministry of Education. Like all previous ROC official romanizations, it is based on the official Chinese dialect of
Mandarin Chinese. Around eighty percent of the Tongyong Pinyin
syllables are spelled identically to those of
mainland China's
Hanyu Pinyin.
Tongyong Pinyin is the successor of
MPS II. Created by Yu Bor-chuan (余伯泉, Yu Boquan) in
1998, Tongyong Pinyin has been modified several times since.
Spelling
Notable features of Tongyong Pinyin are:
* 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') before
front vowel (
i and
e), but
sy and
cy before
yu (to avoid confusion with
su and
cu).
* The Hanyu
i not represented in
Zhuyin 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.
*
eng becomes
ong after
f-, w- (奉、")
*
wen (溫) becomes
wun*
iong becomes
yong, e.g.
syong instead of pinyin
xiong (兇)
*
Ü used in Pinyin is replaced by
yu.
* Unlike Wade-Giles and Hanyu,
iu and
ui [e.g.,
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 is at township-level or below township-level, the letters must be written in full.
* 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, i.e., 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), e.g.,
ji'nan vs.
jin'an. The mark may also, as in the Ministry of the Interior placenames, be a
hyphen.
Some have criticised Tongyong Pinyin for matching more than one traditional
zhuyin initial to the letters
c and
s. Others have pointed out that every single Mandarin syllable can be expressed in equal or fewer keystrokes in Hanyu Pinyin [
1]. Nonetheless, the largest difficulty may lie in that Hanyu Pinyin is both the standard of the PRC, and the internationally accepted ISO standard for the romanization of Mandarin Chinese. For those who have studied Mandarin outside Taiwan and for those who are accustomed to doing business in China, Hanyu Pinyin may be quite indispensable. On the other hand, Tongyong Pinyin supporters have argued that their system avoids
q and
x, letters that are confusing to many English-speakers as to their proper pronuncation.
Even though 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 it was rejected.
The adoption of Tongyong Pinyin has also resulted in political controversy. Much of the controversy centered on issues of national identity, with proponents of
Chinese reunification favoring the Hanyu Pinyin system which is used in the
People's Republic of China, and proponents of
Taiwanese independence favoring the use of Tongyong Pinyin.
In
August 2002, the ROC government adopted Tongyong Pinyin but through an administrative order which local governments can override. Localities with governments controlled by the
Kuomintang, most notably
Taipei City, have overridden the order and are using Hanyu Pinyin for local signs in accordance with the wishes of various groups representing foreign businesses. This creates the odd situation in which adjacent signs have different pinyin based on which government controls them.
In part because of the lack of agreement of which pinyin to use, the goal of the Ministry of Education to replace
Zhuyin with pinyin to teach pronunciation in elementary school remains stalled
as of 2003.
Tongyong Pinyin also has a
Taiwanese phonetic symbol version (台語音標版) which lacks the letter
f but adds the letter
v (for 万).
*
Linguistic analysis*
Hanyu-Tongyong comparison chart*
Formal documents (in
Traditional Chinese): from
Academia Sinica*
Toponomastic Rules (in
Traditional Chinese): from
Wikisource*
Pinyin.info
