Thoughts about another thing I hate: Romanization system disasters

It’s one thing to not know how something is pronounced. It’s one thing to pronounce a foreign word in a certain way because of quirks in your language and culture. It’s another thing to be a native speaker of of the foreign words in another language and not know what the meaning of a romanization system is.

In the land of Taiwan there is a hostility towards coming to grips with how English and Mandarin relate to each other. This WILL continue forever into the future barring a teaching of kid Pinyin (in any form) to children. I have no doubts about this.

Taipei is the exception that proves the rule. That p is not a p. It is a b. Yes, I know it is technically not a b, but it is a b. Writing a p out in roman letters will NEVER inspire a reader of the romanization to sound out a b. Therefore it should go. It is a failed romanization system. If the goal of a romanization system is not inspire the reader to pronounce the word as accurately as possible, or it will never reasonably achieve that, than it is a failure. You might as well romanize 台北 as flabberjock if you don’t care about getting things right or as close to right as possible.

Given all that, Taipei is the exception that proves the rule. If people have heard of Taiwan in the world, the one place they might possibly have heard of is Taipei. And that’s Taipei with a p. In that sense it has become fixed and I have no serious qualms with it staying, though like Peking I do think it should be abandoned in favor of what is unambiguously a better alternative.

台中 is often romanized as Taichung here. It is sounded out as something that rhymes with lung. There is no reason native speakers should do that.

高雄 is a city most people in the word have never heard of and never will hear of. Its common romanization is the famously inscrutable (read: horrible) Kaohsiung. If you’re a native mandarin speaker and you drop a K in your speech, I don’t know what you’re doing. I do know what you’re doing. You’re saying that there’s a k in the front of that romanized word so you better pronounce a k. Wrong. But you can never explain this to someone or it’s a hassle or whatever.

But you know what? It’s a big important city and you don’t have that many other foreign words you’re going to have to use in English (or other language that requires the romanization) so you might as well just do it right.

Taoiseach is an important word. You don’t get to pronounce it like an idiot just because it’s hard to say and or markedly different than how you might sound it out.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Taoiseach

Romanization should be be transparent to the reader. There are reasonable allowance you’re going to have to make. If someone wants to pronounce Shanghai with their a’s a certain way that’s seemingly forgivable. Tell them the a’s are another way and they’ll understand. But no one will ever understand why a ch is a zh/j sound or why a k is really a g. Those are just pure, unfixable failures. Continuing to promote those is just horseshit. If some native mandarin speaker wanted to condescend and humor (or pronounce it like an idiot because they have ZERO concept of what romanization means, or whatever other reasons there are out there!) others by pronouncing Xi’an (Xian to the lazy and or apostrophically disabled) as “ecks” e on, you would slap them in the face(except that would never happen in China where any kid over the age of 4 can read and understands pinyin and basically can never forget it. Only some horrible misinformed or whatever Taiwanese or other person might try something like that). That’s what it’s like to hear Taichung or Kao whatever the fuck people say. It’s not a national tragedy or a horrible fucking shame but it’s pure shit. Ma Ying-jeou and Wu Den-yih are still around, but they’re actually the ones who would fix this crap. Maybe if the names weren’t as ugly and inscrutable as those two piles of poo people wouldn’t be running for president as Annete or Frank. Did you guys not get the memo? No one in the world does that! It’s Sony, not Acer. Samsung, not Asus. Even China doesn’t pull their (and Taiwan’s) backward-ass theories about translation and localization into reverse like Taiwan. You get Haier, not Foxconn.

I resist the urge to write posts like this all the time. Sometimes they leak out. Apologies in post.