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A romanization system is basically a system in which roman (latin) letters are used for languages that use non-roman scripts. This has the obvious benefit that people who can (maybe only) read roman letters (a great part of the world's population) will be able to read it. But people who don't know the language being romanized will pronounce roman letters as they pronounce them in their language or in a general common pronunciation shared by romance languages and english, mainly.

So I've heard people pronounce Chinese names wrong each and every time, when those names have letters like B, D, ZH, C, Q, X and G. This letters are obviously pronounced very different in Pinyin than in any other language, so why were they chosen?

I know that if one were to choose roman letters that sound like Chinese phonemes and not repeating those letters, the roman alphabet just isn't large enough for all Chinese phonemes, but anyway, a foreign speaker shouldn't need to distinguish Q from CH and ZH, especially if they were not to learn the language, but just to pronounce some Chinese names right.

What I think is, Pinyin is great for Chinese learners, who need to tell apart sounds like G & K; Q, CH & ZH; and SH & X, but for foreign readers, a simplified Pinyin should be used.
So if someone who doesn't know chinese, reads "qing xin", they would pronounce "king ksin", but rather, if it was written "ching shin" they would read it right, at least the best way a non-Chinese speaker can.

TL;DR: Sorry for the long post, but the question would be, do you know why this foreigner-confusing letters as Q, X and C were chosen for Pinyin instead of making it more readable for non-chinese speakers?

Edit:
This would be a Relaxed Pinyin which would just allow a better pronunciation of Chinese names for people that don't know Pinyin:

Pinyin - Relaxed Pinyin
B        P
C        TS
CH       CH
D        T
G        K
K        K
P        P
Q        CH
SH       SH
T        T
X        SH
Z        TS
ZH       CH
J        J

Of course, you can't go back from this to Pinyin because some letters represent more than one Piyin letter.

So, for example, the Pinyin qīng xiāo which would be incorrectly pronounced by someone who doesn't know Pinyin, would be written ching shiao in a Relaxed Pinyin, which would allow them to pronunce Chinese in the most possibly correct way they could, without having to learn anything they don't already know.

Petruza
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    Since you are from Argentina, you should know that roman letters are not pronounced the same in all the roman letter-based languages. "r" in Spanish is very different from "r" in French, which itself is different from "r" in English, etc. – laurent Dec 27 '11 at 15:07
  • Of course I know that, and you chose the R example wisely, because it's the one chinese sound that doesn't have a match in nearly no other language. But for the letters I mention, there's a general common shared pronunciation, not the exact same, but a fairly common, don't think discrete, think continuous :D – Petruza Dec 27 '11 at 17:34
  • I think people have addressed some parts of your question, but no one so far has pointed out that Spanish "p" is not pronounced like English "p" (which is pronounced like pinyin "p" and not pronounced like pinyin "b"). See here to learn some more about aspiration and voicing distinctions across languages. – Stumpy Joe Pete Apr 05 '17 at 00:46
  • @StumpyJoePete yes, you're totally right, but for spanish speakers, the spanish P, and the english and pinyin P are homophones, so there's no ambiguity there. But spanish and english B are definitely different from pinyin B. – Petruza Apr 06 '17 at 12:12
  • Petruza, the English and Spanish "p"s are not homophones. Spanish "p" is like pinyin "b", and English "p" is like pinyin "p". Pinyin's decisions on how to represent p/b, t/d, k/g, etc. are really intuitive for native English speakers, even though they might be confusing for a French or Spanish speaker. – Stumpy Joe Pete Jul 13 '17 at 21:12
  • @StumpyJoePete Yes, you are right, but if we consider different levels of homophony, spanish and english P only differ in aspiration, so we could consider them relaxed homophones. In the other hand, Pinyin B is very less homophone of spanish and english B. We would have to go arabic-level of relaxation to consider those B homophones. – Petruza Jul 14 '17 at 15:36
  • I would say that Pinyin options of B, D and G are actually not intuitive for native english speakers, as I never heard one of them pronounce Beijing right. Is it intuitive to read Qi-Gong? Dao? – Petruza Jul 14 '17 at 15:44
  • The distance between /pʰ/ and /p/ is the exact same as the distance from /p/ to /b/. The only reason you don't think so is that they both sound the same to your Spanish-speaking ears. To the average American, hearing a Chinese person say /pʰ/ and /p/ sounds like "p" and "b" respectively. Also to the average American, hearing a Romance-language speaker say /p/ and /b/ also sounds like "p" and "b". Of course the average American says "p" and "b" like /pʰ/ and /b/. This works out well for Americans, and poorly for Romance-language-speakers and Chinese speakers interacting. – Stumpy Joe Pete Jul 14 '17 at 17:19
  • My ears also speak english ;) But anyway, I'm pretty sure I've heard many times americans (and other english speakers) pronounce B in a very different way as pinyin B. If I heard two different sounds as homophones, then you could say my untrained ear is not getting a subtle difference, but it's the other way around. A good example is Wikipedia* using spit as an example of how to pronounce pinyin B. If they sounded the same, they should've used an english word with B.
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin#Rules_given_in_terms_of_English_pronunciation
     – Petruza Jul 19 '17 at 23:35
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    As I said, Americans don't pronounce "b"s like pinyin "b". I said they perceive pinyin "b"s as "b"s. – Stumpy Joe Pete Jul 24 '17 at 22:37
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    because it's not a tool designed for English speakers to pronouce Chinese names, it's only a tool desgined for Chinese speakers to pronounce or type Mandarin. English speakers are not the only people who use latin alphabet, no need to satisfy them. –  Jun 25 '18 at 01:51
  • I don't care about english speakers, I said non-chinese and mainly occidental speakers of languages that use the latin alphabet, the one chosen for pinyin. – Petruza Jun 26 '18 at 07:14
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    pinyin "J" is missing from this list – M.M Aug 11 '18 at 06:23
  • Compare the pronunciation of Italian compared to Spanish. – 伟思礼 Apr 15 '21 at 02:07
  • You hit on the reason many language teaching experts believe that the students should learn to speak and hear before ever seeing any writing. – 伟思礼 Apr 15 '21 at 02:12
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    now every body has mobile phones, please listen to the audio.after audio sound you pronounce it to yourself. Pinyin was developed when books were the major source of learning other than teacher directing the lesson. lot of instructions like pressing the tongue, air should go out, breath in air, lips should not move so much stuff there. I follow listening to audio and pronounce it back loudly until perfect or more or less same, rather going through complexity of all the stuff you never understand – user27485 Apr 15 '21 at 08:19

8 Answers8

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Pinyin, like other written systems, is an arbitrary system, and the corresponding sounds were expressly decided. It seems it was based on preexisting systems: Gwoyeu Romatzyh of 1928, Latinxua Sin Wenz of 1931, and the diacritic markings from Zhuyin (also known as Bopomofo).

But the same problem you highlight in your question happens when learning any other language. For example, I'm Italian and when learning English I had to learn that:

  • "th" can have different pronunciations, that vs thick;
  • "ou" has several pronunciations according to the word: though, foul, through;
  • "c" is not just "tch" or "k" sound but also "s": center;
  • etc...

With Spanish, other sounds, such as "j" in joven, or with french, with "ç" in "ça va?", etc.

So why pinyin with Chinese should be different? A certain system has been decided, all that is left to do is for you to learn that system and learn to distinguish the sounds described in Pinyin from those in your language.

I think the "confusion" is for anyone that decides to learn Chinese (and therefore, Pinyin) regardless of your mother tongue (if not from asian countries): some sounds correspond to a certain language, others to another language and so on, so everyone has some advantage. The sounds that really differ are a few, and you have the same chance of finding them when learning other languages too.

Alenanno
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    The difference is that Pinyin is a romanization system while Spanish, English and Italian are not. Languages weren't created for foreigners to be able to read them, whereas Pinyin, supposedly, is. Pinyin is great for chinese students, as I am, but not for foreigners that want to pronounce chinese names right. – Petruza Dec 26 '11 at 17:46
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    Ok, but then we would need to create a different pinyin for each other language and that was my point: each of us has different rules when it comes to reading. If Chinese had to satisfy each of us, there would be a "french pinyin", a "spanish pinyin", an "italian pinyin", and so on. While now there's only one and all you need to do is learn it. The references are plenty. – Alenanno Dec 26 '11 at 18:03
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    No, not each of us, but C, Q and X have a pretty standard common pronunciation across many languages and it happens to be quite different from Pinyin's. I know Pinyin and it works great for me, what I say is it doesn't work very well for people that don't learn chinese. – Petruza Dec 26 '11 at 19:04
  • More or less in European languages and not in the same conditions. But that would be too long for a comment... :P But a question arises: Why should there be a system for those who don't learn it? I don't think there is a need for (or that there should be) an additional system (or a replacing system for pinyin) expressly for non-learners. – Alenanno Dec 26 '11 at 19:12
  • Besides, it would be impossible to create a system to satisfy all learners, and creating a system which would replace "qing xin" with "ching shin" would be a very English-centric one, discriminating all other learners. On the other hand, I find that pinyin is "mapped" very nicely to Croatian letters and sounds just the way it is, virtually the only two new sounds for me were ü and x (and I already knew ü from German). – dr Hannibal Lecter Dec 26 '11 at 20:53
  • What I say is if there was something like a "Relaxed Pinyin" wich would have CH instead of Q and ZH, SH instead of X, TS instead of C and Z, it just would allow everyone to pronunce chinese names correctly. – Petruza Dec 26 '11 at 22:36
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    Q and ZH are not the same sound, so using only "CH" for both would not be enough. Besides, in italian "CH" is "K", in french it's roughly "SH" and in german it's a voiceless velar frcative, like in "ICH". Only in Spanish it is "tch" as in "watch". Note that "TS" is not necessarily the same as "C" in Chinese. Again, we go back to the point: you want to base pinyin on european languages. Pinyin is not there for who doesn't learn Chinese, but to provide a small aid for those who are learning it. – Alenanno Dec 26 '11 at 22:46
  • You can put any example you want, none will be worst that using Q for its equivalent sound in chinese, the same with X, C, etc. I understand what you say and agree, Pinyin is for studying chinese. I get it, it's ok. I just say that it would be so easy to make others pronounce chinese right, and yet they have to say KS when they see an X. – Petruza Dec 26 '11 at 22:53
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    I guess we have to agree to disagree... :) But don't you think that SH for both "SH" and "X" is confusing? They're not the same sounds, why would you use the same letters? – Alenanno Dec 26 '11 at 22:56
  • I totally agree Alenanno, the sounds that I claim should have the same letter ARE in fact different. So different that chinese people can distinguish them when they speak, of course. And I, after one year of studying, are slowly learning to tell appart. Again, I hear everyone that reads Xing pronouncing Ksing, and that's much further away for the correct pronunciation that Pinyin's x and sh, so, if a non-speaker would pronounce shing for xing at least, it would be much, much closer to the actual pronunciation. And this turned into a forum thread, so I'm stopping here. – Petruza Dec 27 '11 at 17:39
  • @Petruza No problem! And lucky you, I don't think I am already the "tell them apart" phase... :) But I'm struggling! – Alenanno Dec 27 '11 at 18:06
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    You might be astonished, @petruza, to learn that pronouncing C as TS is standard in all Roman alphabet slavic languages. Besides, C is definitely a letter with many proununciation variations. In Italian it's k before anything but i and e, and ch before those. In French, it can be k or s, and is s if with cedilla (ç). In English it can be pronounced k or s. In Spanish, k or s, though that pronunciations can also be /θ/ (hard English th). In Slavic languages it's s, plus ch if č, and alveolo-palatal ch if ć. X is dz in Albanian. If we go into Zulu or Xhose, CQX are clicks. – MickG Sep 07 '14 at 13:09
  • Anyway I think a solution to this might be reintroducing Wade-Giles, which is more "eloquent" in terms of "how do I pronounce that?". It is, of course, English-based, but I guess anyone would guess sh is pronounced the way it is, it's quite standard in romanizations. Even Russian can be romanized like that, if you don't want š. I would NOT, however, map pinyin g to k, b to p and d to t, because I have heard those sounds are very often pronounced as the pinyin suggests. Also, the aspiration in pinyin k t p is sometimes lost, so if we want to represent the sounds, pinyin is best in this case. – MickG Sep 07 '14 at 13:14
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    The drawback would be that seeing a Chinese name somewhere, a student would not know whether it was the simplification or actual Pinyin, and if the student in question is keen on phonetic precision, it would annoy him in the same way as hearing mispronounced Chinese annoys you. As for example when I saw "Juan" on the timetable in my Uni and thought it was pinyin, and later learnt it was Wade-Giles and the matching pinyin was "Ruan". So in the end, I don't think it's worth modifying: if you hear someone mispronouncing Chinese, just correct them. – MickG Sep 07 '14 at 13:19
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I have never found a reasoning on how Pinyin was created, but as Alenanno says, there have been predecessors and people working on the Pinyin standard already had some experience with existing systems. Some sounds can probably be mapped to similar IPA notation, while others seem totally off.

From my own reasoning I'd say there are at least two arguments that may speak for the possibly awkward choice of letters:

  1. Whatever letters you chose, you could quite possibly only satisfy the pronunciation system of one language. And given that many sounds of Mandarin cannot be pronounced by non-native speakers, why even try to find "closer" matches (in whatever metrics you would define)? After all Pinyin was developed to map all Putonghua sounds to Roman letters in a bijective fashion. It is used to teach millions of Chinese school children, not only for foreigners to pronounce.
  2. There are 26 Roman letters. Without wanting to introduce too many diacritics, you need to map all the sounds to this limited set. There are already "overloaded" letters like 'e' having different pronunciations or simplifications like the sound 'ü' becoming 'u' (e.g. "yu" vs. "nü"). Any more tweaks will make the overall system more complicated.

There are, by the way, academic studies on how Pinyin "letter mismatch" complicates the acquisition of Mandarin for western speakers. I'll look for them if you want more details.

hippietrail
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cburgmer
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  • Yes, I'd love to read such studies, thanks! – Petruza Dec 26 '11 at 22:37
  • I will look for the article. Do remind me if I fail to answer. – cburgmer Dec 27 '11 at 18:27
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    You failed to answer. :D – Petruza Sep 08 '12 at 21:25
  • Sorry, you are right. So the book is stored away somewhere. Here's what I could find online: http://www.blcup.com/en/list_1.asp?id=1783 The Cognition, Learning and Teaching of Chinese Characters, Guder et al. One article is about doing tests on how students pronounce Pinyin incorrectly following hints derived from their native language (it might have been Italian). – cburgmer Sep 10 '12 at 11:49
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    I found pinyin "letter mismatch" so disruptive, that I deliberately learned zhuyin (bopomofo), which I found to really help clarify the sounds by letting me get away from roman letters that meant very different things to me. – juckele Dec 14 '12 at 15:56
  • @juckele Yeah, same here. I don't feel I properly understood Mandarin phonetics until I studied Zhuyin. And, to this day, if I have to input something phonetically, I always use zhuyin. There's an interesting back story to how pinyin was created by the communists. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin If you ask me, they should have stuck with zhuyin, which is a better system. – YQ002lc2 Oct 21 '21 at 06:33
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Pinyin was designed primarily as a writing system for Chinese speakers to use, and to help children who speak other dialects to learn Mandarin. As such, making it easy for foreigners was not a particular priority.

In any case, different languages use the Roman letters differently, so what would be obvious choice? For example, in different languages J can pronounced like in the English words lo*ch* (Spanish), plea*s*ure (French), or *y*es (German and many other languages this side of Europe).

Consider also that Catalan pronounces X like 'sh', Polish pronounces C like 'ts', and Spanish pronounces Q like Italian pronounces CH, so these aren't terrible choices.

At least with Pinyin you can learn how to pronounce it properly, unlike Wade-Giles which, since it is almost never used correctly, leaves even proficient speakers making wild guesses.

Richard C
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    This is the key point - pinyin was not designed for foreign learners, but for the Chinese people themselves. – neubau Dec 31 '13 at 05:50
  • Bopomofo makes more sense to me as a system devised for Chinese learners. But why choose Roman, which, in general, has standard pronunciation for their consonants, despite the differences you mention? Pinyin is not only used to teach chinese to the chinese, but as a standard system of romanization, and as such the result is that most foreigners trying to pronounce it get it consistently wrong, and that seems like a very bad choice to me. – Petruza Apr 15 '21 at 01:26
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Origin of Pinyin characters

Pinyin inherits many of its orthographic choices from earlier romanisations of Chinese, namely the Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Latinxua Sin Wenz (and zhuyin for diacritics).

The b/p, d/t, g/k distinction for aspirated/unaspirated consonants is inherited from this, and was likely chosen by analogy to them being voiced/unvoiced.1

The other less intuitive choices are mostly for the sibilants, many of which do not have analogues in English and hence were likely inspired by other latin-script languages:

Letter Sound Origin Possible inspiration
x [ɕ] Latinxua Sin Wenz Portuguese/Catalan "x"
z [ts] Latinxua Sin Wenz Italian "z"
q [tɕʰ] ? Likely a replacement for Latinxua Sin Wenx "ki"
since "k" is already used for [kʰ].
c [tsʰ] Latinxua Sin Wenz Czech/Polish/Slovak "c"

Wade-Giles

Your relaxed pinyin is roughly analogous to an earlier romanisation with English-speakers in mind - Wade-Giles:

enter image description here

Notes:

The unaspirated stops and affricates [ p, t, k, ʈʂ, ts] can become voiced [b, d, g, ɖʐ , dz] when they occur in an unstressed syllable, such as [tswəi pa] → [tswəi ba] ‘mouth’ (M. Fu 1956: 3; Dong 1958: 75). It is possible to represent [ p, t, k, ʈʂ, ts, ph, th, kh, ʈʂh, tsh] as [b, d, g, ɖʐ , dz, p, t, k, ʈʂ, ts] instead;

  • The Phonology of Standard Chinese
大胳膊雅各布
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  • I wonder if Albanian is a good candidate for the nearest for "q": it represents a voiceless palatal affricate /c͡ç/ in standard forms of that language. But a "variant" of "k" also makes diachronic sense. – Michaelyus Apr 15 '21 at 15:08
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I vaguely remember reading that Pinyin was developed originally to teach Chinese to Russians, so some of the sounds are based on Russian sounds. I'm not sure how the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets were mapped.

From a brief browse through Wikipedia articles on Pinyin and Sin Wenz the Russian connection sounds reasonable, but I can't find any details to confirm my memory. I suspect I originally read about it in either The Man Who Loved China, or one of Peter Hessler's books.

Don Kirkby
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  • Well this actually makes sense of the choice of using zh which is the same romanization and it's kind of a plosive version of Ж – Petruza Dec 27 '11 at 17:42
  • To expand on "how the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet were mapped", ц (pronounced TS) is sometimes transliterated to C, where "sometimes" means "when a transliteration system is used that tries to map one cyrillic letter to one roman letter". sh->š, ch->č, but if it was for Russians learning CHinese, how were they taught to distinguish CH from Q, when in Russian basically only Q exists? No @petruza, zh is the affricate version of ж. It's like дж. And Q would be ч, which is "soft" (palatalized, hence alveolo-palatal). – MickG Sep 07 '14 at 13:27
  • An affricate is plosive+fricative, so д+ж. – MickG Sep 07 '14 at 13:28
  • I received the same explanation from my American-born Chinese professor (who spent many years in China before returning to USA to teach). – 伟思礼 Oct 13 '17 at 11:29
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The international phonetic alphabet would have been a great tool. I understand petruza's frustration completely. Names like Zhuang, Zhang, Zhou and Qing to name a few are almost always mispronounced. Tones and accents are not the problem, the accuracy of consonants needs to be brought in.

dusan
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Stephen Brockie
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  • Yes, the IPA is the ultimate romanization system for any language, but most people wouldn't have a clue on how to pronounce it. I only took one year of chinese, but at the end of that course I was barely able to distinguish Q from CH and other similar groups of phonemes, let alone tones. I cringe every time I hear Qing pronounced as King (or even Kwing, ugh) and Xiao as Ksiao. – Petruza Apr 15 '21 at 01:33
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"X" is not pronounced like "sh" but much closer to "s" but slightly softer. "Xiexie", if pronounced correctly, should be close to "sear sear" not "shear shear" in American English (without the audible "r" at the end). "星(xing)" sounds almost the same as "sing".

I agree that "q" is confusing but I think they can change "ch" to "tr" and "q" to "ch".

Emmie Ruta
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  • Ok, then S would be a better option than X for that sound. My suggestions may not be the best, I'm of course biased by a particular set of phonemes based on the languages I know, but in any case, I think there must be far better options than X, Q and ZH. – Petruza Apr 07 '17 at 13:46
  • I doubt they are interested in re-educating their billions to make things convenient for America's millions, most of whom are not interested in learning Chinese. Especially since the change would not benefit the many non-Americans who are interested. – 伟思礼 Oct 13 '17 at 11:31
  • @伟思礼 I don't care about Americans specifically, but almost everybody out of China will get Pinyin wrong. And a romanization system is not only for learning languages, it's also to have a sort of common ground for anyone to try and pronounce foreign names correctly. Using the Roman alphabet was a good choice as most humans know how to read it, and the majority will agree on how to pronounce it, but then they messed up with things like X, C and Q. – Petruza Apr 15 '21 at 01:39
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Of course, there is a standard Chinese pronunciation as known as Beijing accent. But the pronunciation of a word can be very different.
Pinyin is created in order to popularize a kind of standard pronunciation. The reason why Pinyin using English character is just because it is convenient.There is some related point between pinyin pronunciation and English character, but I think you should ignore it.
If you look up the history of Pinyin in wikipedia,you can get more information.

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