Everyone knows it’s hard enough to learn Chinese in the first place. But then regional dialects impact upon the way things are spoken as opposed to how they are written. And to make matters worse, the Romanisation of Chinese remains something of an inexact science.
Before I was first sent to China in 1993, my boss at the time would talk about a place called Peking in one sentence, and Beijing in the next. I thought they were two different cities.
That’s the first problem, as we will come to later. Now on to Nanjing. No, Nanjing. Aren’t they the same thing? No. One is here in Jiangsu and the other is in Fujian Province. The difference, of course, lies in the Chinese characters for their names, the former being “南京” and the latter “南靖”. So, yeah. Pinyin is already revealing its inadequacies.
While the pinyin for our smaller cousin to the south is 100 percent correct today, 100 years ago, it may well have been “Nanqin”. That’s because before its standardisation as pinyin in the 1950s, there were countless ways to render Chinese characters as Roman equivalents, based on their pronunciation.
As yet another barrier to those wishing to learn Chinese today, there are still many examples of these archaic Romanisation systems in use today. As our first witness, we call Tsingtao Beer (青岛啤酒) to the stand, as the brewer retains on its bottles the old Romanisation to this day, while the rest of the world simply flocks to the beaches of “Qingdao” (and that brewery).
A bit further north, in their excuse for a capital, there are Peking University (北京大学) and Tsinghua University (清华大学), respectively “Beijing” and “Qinghua” today.
The most fun of all, however, is to be had when local people completely ignore that the authorities decree to be a place’s official name, believing quite rightly that they know better. For example, many a student in Nanjing will tell you that Hehai University (河海大學) is of course pronounced, “Hohai University”, and would not in a million years contemplate going by anything else.
Elsewhere, over in Hebei Province, there’s a place called Leting (乐亭). But that’s silly to the locals, who prefer the moniker, “Laoting”.
Even more complicated, there are places which change their pronunciation but are unable to fllow suit with the pinyin. To our southeast, in Zhejiang Province, find Taizhou (台州), the “Tai” of which locals pronounce using first tone, not second tone. The same goes for Lishui (丽水), where they use third tone to say, “Li”, not forth.
Saving the best for last. Nanjing’s finest example of the local dialect for a place name not following its official version is our northerly district of Liuhe (六合). The Nanjinger renders it thus, but perhaps we should forgo the continuity on which we pride ourselves in this case, since the entire populace says, “Luhe”.
And as can be seen above, the local pronunciation has become such an accepted part of the lexicon that the Nanjing authorities have paid homage to the fact in the English on its road signs. Perhaps Pinyin has its uses, after all.
