pinyin

Pinyin is the most widely-used romanization system for Mandarin Chinese. It uses a subset of the Latin alphabet + diacritics to represent tones.

In my opinion there should be more of an effort to establish pinyin as an equally accepted, parallel system to Chinese characters. The main reason is to make it easier for people to learn Chinese. I think a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment is rooted in ignorance, which is taken advantage of and exacerbated by government/media propaganda, and if it were easier for people to learn Chinese and understand Chinese perspectives, it would help to defuse international tensions.

notice I said parallel system: I'm not advocating for completely replacing Chinese characters, which do have their advantages - quicker to type on modern keyboards, visual encoding of meaning, aesthetic value, etc.

sorting

normally pinyin is sorted in alphabetical order on a letter-by-letter basis, but I prefer to sort on a syllable basis by vowel sound, then initial consonant, then final consonant, then tone.

advantages of syllabic sorting:

• 🍀 no recursive interruption: i.e., interrupting the list of words starting with ba- for words that start with ban- then interrupting that list for words starting with bang-

• 🍀 separation of tones: i.e. jiān, jiǎn, and jiàn are completely different morphemes, which can each be represented with multiple different characters, and it's annoying to have all of these jumbled together under simply "jian"

• 🍀 related words are closer together: Chinese often uses visually similar characters for similar sounds e.g. ban/pan, which would both be listed under -an syllables rather than farther apart under b- and p- headings

segmentation

since there are no spaces between characters in Chinese texts, it can seem a bit unclear where to separate words in pinyin. once you see some examples and learn some general rules of thumb, it becomes a lot more straightforward. the tl;dr is:

• 🌸 words are usually 1-3 syllables, so phrases with 4+ syllables should be separated accordingly. exceptions: technical terms, foreign loanwords.

• 🌸 separate different parts of speech. exceptions: common verbal particles and prefixes/suffixes

• 🌸 there's often a difference between a phrase being used literally or idiomatically, with the idiomatic version being written as one word and the literal version being written as separate words. example: zuì jìn - (physically) nearest vs zuìjìn - recently

• 🌸 parallel structures and abbreviations can be hyphenated

unfortunately a lot of automated pinyin conversion tools separate each individual syllable, which is pretty much unreadable. the only one I'm aware of that makes an attempt to separate pinyin into actual words is Google Translate (it usually puts a pinyin transcription underneath the original text). more work definitely needs to be done in this area for pinyin to be more widely adopted.

criticisms

-- characters are necessary to distinguish homophones

if this were true, the spoken language would be unintelligible. the "gotchas" where characters are necessary to distinguish meaning are mostly in classical texts which are very different from how the language is spoken today. nowadays a lot of words are polysyllabic and/or easily recognizable from context, so there aren't really that many opportunities for confusion. in rare cases the character can just be included in parentheses if necessary.

-- latin characters are imperialist

this is just throwing out the baby with the bathwater. should they also go back to hanfu, abandon western-style medicine, etc? I think it's relevant to note that pinyin was created by the Chinese for themselves, not imposed by Western powers/institutions.

-- the q/x/vowel sounds are unintuitive

this is like when people complain about markdown because apparently using asterisks to make your text bold is "too hard". all languages that use the Latin alphabet have their own quirks for the pronunciation of certain letters. and unless you're using the IPA, written language is pretty much always an approximation and you still need to learn a more exact authentic pronunciation. i don't think pinyin is asking all that much here, people are just lazy.

-- pinyin is hard to type

this is a legitimate weakness. you can generally type pinyin alright on mobile by long-pressing vowel keys, even if that is a bit slow. however, i'm not aware of any pc keyboard layout that allows you to easily type in pinyin. there are other tools for it but they all seem to have some kind of annoying problem. the best solution i've found so far is WinCompose with custom keybindings but setting this up is still quite inconvenient. for pinyin to be more widely adopted people need to be able to smoothly and easily type it on their computer.

see also

• 🪷 tonal spelling

resources

• 🍃 pinyin.info - a site dedicated to information and news about pinyin
• 🍃 UPenn's Language Log - regular news and discussion about language-related topics, especially Chinese and pinyin. tends to have a neoliberal viewpoint but still a lot of good content