Dear Taiwanese friends; here's why we can't pronounce your names

It's easy for us in the West to take for granted that Asians feel compelled to assume English names when immigrating to our countries. In fact, our culture demands it. While we're accommodating to all the Diegos and Stanislavs and Gethsemanes who come from other distant corners of the world, for some reason we refuse to cut any slack to Dong Hyun, Zhen Yi, or Yusuke. "Can I just call you John?" is what most of us would ask.

I've generally been sensitive about the names I use for my foreign friends. When I become close to someone, I'll ask what their native name is. Half the time, my acquaintance prefers his English name. "Don't ever call me Ming Han. Only my mom calls me that, and usually when she's mad." The other half the time, I get a response like, "I love my Chinese name. I only picked an English name because I felt I had to, so I'm really happy if you call me Wei Cheng."

"Patrick" and "Alan"

There was a telling moment when I was staying in Taiwan. My friend from Malaysia, Shen Siung, came to visit me and my friend Tzuching. These were the names I had always known them by. Yet when they met, they called each other Patrick and Alan. Here I was trying to respect their culture by using their proper Mandarin Chinese names, but even with each other, these two Chinese men reverted to English names. I was astounded. I looked at them both and asked what was going on.

Shen Siung said, "You Westerners don't know how to pronounce our names properly." But you guys aren't Westerners, I replied. After some more probing, I got what he meant: Western culture imposed on them spellings that even they couldn't understand. The confusion was borne out of the antiquated and byzantine system of romanization that Taiwan and Malaysia had adopted. During the discussion, I came to realize that I had been mispronouncing their names since the days when I first met them, and they were too polite to correct me.

Learning Chinese in Taipei

The method of romanizing Mandarin Chinese used by the Taiwanese was invented in the mid-1800s by academics named Wade and Giles, and thus it was unsubtly christened the Wade-Giles system. However, the system recognized by the International Organization for Standardization is a creation from the mid-1950s called pinyin. Because it was developed by China's Communist government, the Taiwanese shunned pinyin to distinguish a separate identity from the mainland. Fully adopting pinyin would have been seen by many as a form of linguistic treason. (Pinyin has been used to some degree in Taiwan for the past decade, but more about that later.)

Consider the grief that this stubbornness causes. Coming back to my friends Shen Siung and Tzuching, here are their names in pinyin: Shan Xiong and Zi Jing. Actual pronunciation: Shan Shee-ong and Dz-Jing. Neither Wade-Giles nor pinyin represent an exact phonetic transliteration (the linguistic term for "translating" a character-based language into a phonetic alphabet), but which one do you find more accurate?

Learning pinyin, a writing
assignment from week-one
of Chinese class.

To be frank, there is actually no single perfect system of transliterating Mandarin Chinese into our Roman alphabet. That's because there are subtle sounds in Mandarin that don't have an English equivalent. (In linguistics, these sounds are called phonemes.) For instance, our ch phoneme comes from placing the tongue on the roof of the mouth, coming out like chuh. In Chinese, there are two ch phonemes – one similar to ours, and another made with the tongue extended closer to the teeth, sounding like chee. It's the same with sh – one from the front of the mouth, another from the back.

The challenge in romanizing Chinese is to imagine new letter combinations that represent these different phonemes. Between Wade-Giles and pinyin, the most accurate in many people's opinion is the latter.

Many aspects of Wade-Giles resemble a bit of a linguistic joke. Take, for instance, Peking. That was the old spelling of China's capital city before the nation formally adopted pinyin in the 1970s. (Peking was actually a French-missionary spelling, not Wade-Giles, which would have been Peiching, but still an interesting example.) I had always been curious as to why China changed the name to Beijing. But, in fact, bay-jing has always been the pronunciation. 

In Taiwan, however, they continue to insist on phonetic spellings that often bear no relation to actual pronunciation. The city of Kaohsiung is one good example. Kow-see-ung is how I always spoke it. In fact, it's closer to gao-shee-ong. And did you know that Taipei is actually tai-bei? In fact, there is a method to the Wade-Giles madness, a formula to explain how "k" becomes "g" and "p" becomes "b", but it's not worth explaining here, as it remains understood only by academics. The Taiwanese layman generally has no clue as to the workings of the nation's transliteration system.

This is not to say that pinyin is flawless. With the example of Kaohsiung, the pinyin spelling is Gaoxiong. The "x" would throw off native English speakers. It's not easy to intuit that it represents a sh phoneme. However, here's what pinyin does to make the learning and intuition of the system easier: it makes use of redundant Roman letters to represent phonemes that aren't replicated in English. While the letter combination "sh" in pinyin represents its English equivalent, "x" represents the softer sh with the tongue extended. Similarly, "ch" is self-explanatory, but "q" is the letter that represents ch with the tongue moved toward the teeth.

Wade-Giles is misleading by taking common letters and changing their vocalizations. Let's look at Kaohsiung again. The sound of the letter "k" in English is made with a burst of air but no vocalization. The letter "g" is like "k" but with a vocalization. Why should the "g" phoneme end up being represented by the letter "k"? Again, we can look at Peking (Peiching) and Taipei – the "b" phoneme (made with vocal chords) ended up being represented by the letter "p". You will find this replacement of vocalized and non-vocalized letters and phonemes all throughout the Wade-Giles system.

When pinyin needs to use a letter to represent a phoneme not found in English, it uses letters with similar English phonemes, making the pronunciation of a word easier to intuit. With that in mind, look at the difference between Tsingtao and Qingdao, the same Chinese city before and after pinyin was adopted. Neither has a completely intuitive spelling for native-English speakers. But the former version uses "ts" for a soft ch phoneme, and "t" (non-vocalized) for d phoneme (vocalized). In pinyin, the temptation might be to pronounce Qingdao as king-dow, but once you learn that the "q" is a soft ch, it's not as hard to wrap your head around that as it is to think of "t" forming a d phoneme. The old spelling of Tsingtao has the potential for a reader to misunderstand two phonemes, whereas the pinyin Qingdao only offers one misleading phoneme. It's not perfect, as no language system is, but it does the job more efficiently.

So that explains the problem Westerners have pronouncing names that use the Wade-Giles system. We meet Mao Tse-Tung and we pronounce his name phonetically. In fact, it's not t-see-tung but dzeh-dong. (Wade-Giles even changes the phonemes of the vowels by using tung for dong.) The pinyin spelling, Mao Zedong, is more likely to elicit a correct pronunciation, making Mr. Mao less likely to say, "Just call me Dave."

Try it with this Wade-Giles name: Hsien Chiu. Did you say huh-see-en chee-oo? Now in pinyin: Xian Jiu. I bet you're closer to the actual pronunciation: shee-an jee-oh.

I am not a linguist and I have not done any studies or serious readings on this subject. I am in no way an expert. However, I think my layman's observations are probably more relevant than an expert's opinion, because you shouldn't have to be an academic to pronounce the name of the street you see on a map, or a city you want to visit, or to greet a new friend or employee.

I should also state that I have simplified Taiwan's linguistic predicament in this post for the sake of clarity. It's actually more of a mess than I let on. Taiwan did adopt something called Tongyong Pinyin between 2002 and 2008, which was a sort of compromise that would have allowed Taiwan to ditch Wade-Giles while not conforming to mainland China's system. Standard pinyin (called Hanyu Pinyin) has since been adopted officially, but the government continues to abide with a jumble of systems – in Taipei (Wade-Giles) you can find Jhongjheng Road (Tongyong Pinyin) and visit the Xindian district (Hanyu Pinyin) or take the train to Tamsui (Wade-Giles). Birth certificates and passports in Taiwan, as far as I can tell, are still being issued mostly with Wade-Giles transliterations.

All of this just creates unnecessary stumbling blocks for those of us who are learning Chinese and must use some form of romanization to grasp pronunciation. Westerners living in Taiwan can regale you with stories about the inanity of signs being replaced and re-replaced, and systems being adopted, modified and reverted, depending on which party (the pro-China KMT or the pro-independence DPP) is in power, which county or city you're in, or which constituency is most vocal about its preference at any given time.

In the meantime, here's my advice for any Chinese person dealing with Westerners. If you absolutely want to ditch your Chinese name, by all means, take an English one. If you like your Chinese name and you have a Wade-Giles spelling, adopt a pinyin rendering (or even something more phonetic if necessary). And if we still can't pronounce it, teach us. After all, if you took the time to learn our entire language, we can take the time to learn your name.