Tag: Transliteration

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Yànwén

Yànwén (Yàn·wén {Proverb (Korean: Vernacular)} · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 谚文 諺文) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

This week’s MEotW is “Yànwén (Yàn·wén {Proverb (Korean: Vernacular)} · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 谚文 諺文)”, which seems to be the most commonly used Mandarin expression referring to the modern Korean writing system. In English, we refer to this writing system as “Hangul” or “Hankul”, depending on which romanization system we prefer.

The Korean text “Joseongeul” and “Hangeul,” written in Hangul, the native Korean script.

The Korean text “Joseongeul” and “Hangeul,” written in Hangul, the native Korean script. [source]
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“…By Any Other Name”

One of the first things I noticed while researching this topic is that Korean, English, and Mandarin each have multiple names for the modern Korean writing system. Here is Wikipedia’s summary of its names in Korean and in English:

Official names

The Korean alphabet was originally named Hunminjeong’eum (훈민정음) by King Sejong the Great in 1443.[source] Hunminjeong’eum (훈민정음) is also the document that explained logic and science behind the script in 1446.

The name hangeul (한글) was coined by Korean linguist Ju Si-gyeong in 1912. The name combines the ancient Korean word han (한), meaning great, and geul (글), meaning script. The word han is used to refer to Korea in general, so the name also means Korean script.[source] It has been romanized in multiple ways:

  • Hangeul or han-geul in the Revised Romanization of Korean, which the South Korean government uses in English publications and encourages for all purposes.
  • Han’gŭl in the McCune–Reischauer system, is often capitalized and rendered without the diacritics when used as an English word, Hangul, as it appears in many English dictionaries.
  • hān kul in the Yale romanization, a system recommended for technical linguistic studies.

North Koreans call the alphabet Chosŏn’gŭl (조선글), after Chosŏn, the North Korean name for Korea.[source] A variant of the McCune–Reischauer system is used there for romanization.

Other names

Until the mid-20th century, the Korean elite preferred to write using Chinese characters called Hanja. They referred to Hanja as jinseo (진서/真書) meaning true letters. Some accounts say the elite referred to the Korean alphabet derisively as ‘amkeul (암클) meaning women’s script, and ‘ahaetgeul (아햇글) meaning children’s script, though there is no written evidence of this.[source]

Supporters of the Korean alphabet referred to it as jeong’eum (정음/正音) meaning correct pronunciation, gungmun (국문/國文) meaning national script, and eonmun (언문/諺文) meaning vernacular script.[source]

In addition to all the above, some dictionaries, including the ABC Chinese-English Dictionary, use the English name “onmun” to refer to the modern Korean writing system. This is apparently derived from the Korean name “eonmun (언문/諺文)”, mentioned in the last paragraph of the above quote. Speaking of “eonmun (언문/諺文)”, the Chinese characters used to write it are the same as the Traditional characters used to write this week’s MEotW “Yànwén (Yàn·wén {Proverb (Korean: Vernacular)} · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 谚文 諺文)”, indicating that this is where this Mandarin expression came from.

Speaking of “Yànwén (Yàn·wén {Proverb (Korean: Vernacular)} · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 谚文 諺文)”, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, this seems to be the expression most commonly used in Mandarin to mean “Hangul”—it is, for example, the main expression used to refer to Hangul in the Mandarin version of an Awake! article about Hangul. Also used in that Mandarin version of that Awake! article—once—to refer to Hangul is the expression “Hánwén (Hán·wén Korean · Writing → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system)] 韩文 韓文)”. Another Mandarin expression referring to the modern Korean writing system is “Cháoxiǎn Zìmǔ ((Cháo·xiǎn {Royal/Imperial Court [→ [Dynasty]]} · Rare → [North Korea | Chosŏn (Tw pron.: Cháoxiān)] 朝鲜 朝鮮) (Zì·mǔ Word · Mothers → [Letters (of an Alphabet) [→ [Alphabet]]] 字母) → [Hangul/Hankul (modern Korean writing system) (name used in North Korea)])”, which corresponds to the Korean expression “Chosŏn’gŭl (조선글)”, mentioned above. (“Cháoxiǎn (Cháo·xiǎn {Royal/Imperial Court [→ [Dynasty]]} · Rare → [North Korea | Chosŏn; [Great] Joseon [State] (Tw pron.: Cháoxiān)] 朝鲜 朝鮮)” corresponds to “Chosŏn”, the Korean name for North Korea—these two expressions are in fact written with the same Chinese characters.)

An Exceptionally Phonetic Writing System

In the linguistics podcast Lingthusiasm, in the episode entitled “Writing is a Technology”, linguist Gretchen McCulloch said the following about Hangul:

“But Korean’s really cool.” The thing that’s cool about it from a completely biased linguist perspective is that the writing system of Korean, Hangul, the script, is not just based on individual sounds or phonemes, it’s actually at a more precise level based on the shape of the mouth and how you configure the mouth in order to make those particular sounds. There’s a lot of, okay, here are these closely related sounds – let’s say you make them all with the lips – and you just add an additional stroke to make it this other related sound that you make with the lips. Between P and B and M, which are all made with the lips, those symbols have a similar shape. It’s not an accident. It’s very systematic between that and the same thing with T and D and N. Those have a similar shape because they have this relationship. It’s very technically beautiful from an analysis of language perspective.

[Note that the above quote alludes to the featural aspect of Hangul. The term “featural” refers to distinctive features, which are components of speech such as nasality, aspiration, voicing, place of articulation, etc. which are subphonemic, that is, below the level of phonemes. In his book Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems, pp. 196–198, John DeFrancis concludes that while Hangul has a featural aspect, and while it is an ingenious system of phonemic representation, it is not a featural writing system.]

Regarding how precisely Hangul represents the sounds of Korean speech, the above-mentioned Awake! article says:

In Korean schools there are no spelling contests! Why not? Because Hankul represents the sounds of Korean speech so accurately that writing them down correctly as you hear them presents no challenge.

Elsewhere, that Awake! article also explains how Hangul systematically represents the sounds of Korean syllables:

All Korean syllables consist of two or three parts: an initial sound, a middle sound (a vowel or vowels) and, usually, an ending sound. Words are made up of one or more syllables. Each syllable is written inside an imaginary box, as shown below. The initial sound (a consonant or the silent ㅇ) is written at the top or upper left. If the middle vowel is vertically shaped, it is written to the right of the initial sound, while horizontally shaped vowels are written under it. Letters may also be doubled, adding stress, and multiple vowels may be compressed and written alongside each other. If the syllable has a final consonant, it always appears in the bottom position. In this way, thousands of different syllables can be represented with Hankul.

I don’t speak or read Korean, but from what I can gather from information like the above quotes, it seems that Hangul is like Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) (“Piecing Together of Sounds”), but for Korean.

The Hangul of Mandarin?

If Hangul is like Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) for Korean, then conversely, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is like Hangul for Mandarin, at least when it comes to what is accomplished by its technical design—both systems systematically represent the individual phonemes (distinct speech sounds that can distinguish one word from another) of the language it was designed for.

Another thing that Hangul and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) have in common is that they have both been bitterly opposed and ridiculed by supporters of Chinese characters. Even though it was sponsored by King Sejong of the Korean Yi dynasty, Hangul was opposed by scholars, etc. who were invested in the more complex Chinese characters, the Hànzì (Hàn·zì {Han (Chinese)} · Characters 汉字 漢字) (or the Hanja, as the Koreans call them), and even though Hangul was created way back in the 1440s, the above-mentioned Awake! article says that “more than 400 years elapsed before the Korean government declared that Hankul could be used in official documents.” That was in 1894, and it would not be until 1949 in North Korea and the 1970s in South Korea that Hangul was promoted to become the dominant writing system in these places.

Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) was promoted by Máo Zédōng ((Máo Hair (surname) 毛) (Zé·dōng Marsh · East 泽东 澤東) (the founder of the People’s Republic of China)) and other early movers and shakers in modern China as a full writing system that was intended to eventually replace the Chinese characters, but when Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) was officially adopted by the PRC in 1958, it was not as a full writing system with equal status to that of the Chinese characters. (A scenario like that, with two writing systems for the same language, is known as digraphia.) (By the way, like Hangul and Zhōngguó (Zhōng·guó Central · Nation → [Chinese] 中国 中國) Mángwén (Máng·wén Blind · Writing → [Braille] 盲文) (中国盲文/中國盲文, Chinese Braille), Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)—designed along similar principles as those other two systems—is indeed a full writing system, not just a pronunciation aid.) As with Hangul, scholars, etc. who were heavily invested in the Chinese characters wouldn’t stand for that. Even as late as 2001, China’s Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language of the People’s Republic of China said that in China, Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is officially just “the tool of transliteration and phonetic notation”.

If Hangul took hundreds of years to become the dominant writing system in Korea, even with the added nationalistic motivation of it having been invented in Korea to be used instead of the characters invented in China, then Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) could take even longer to become the dominant writing system for Mandarin, if it ever does, and if this old system were hypothetically allowed to last that long—the supporters of invented-in-China Chinese characters are even more proudly and stubbornly resistant to the idea of changing away from Chinese characters in China itself.

At this rate, the current government of China, as long as it lasts, will probably never explicitly officially approve of using Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) as a full writing system for Mandarin in China, even if it’s just as an alternative to the characters instead of as a total replacement for them. Even if it actually wanted to do so, even this government would hesitate to approve of something like this that would probably be opposed by many of the people of China. (As a historic comparison, in 1977, the PRC promulgated a second round of simplified Chinese characters, but this was rescinded in 1986 following widespread opposition.)

Your Own Personal Hangul for Mandarin?

However, while that may be the situation with the proud worldly nation of China, what about each of us Mandarn field language learners, as individuals who are dedicated to Jehovah God and not to any worldly human culture? Especially if we don’t live in China, under the authority of the current government of China, we are free to choose for ourselves to use Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) as a full writing system for Mandarin and thus be fully empowered by its simplicity and elegance to serve Jehovah better, as long as we don’t allow ourselves to be shackled by mere human tradition, or by peer pressure.

Even in China itself, people should take into account that Article 18 of the above-mentioned Law on the Standard Spoken and Written Chinese Language of the People’s Republic of China says, in part:

The “Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet” [Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)] is the unified norm of the Roman letters for transliterating the names of Chinese people and places as well as Chinese documents and is used in the realms where it is inconvenient to use the Chinese characters or where the Chinese characters cannot be used.

Technically, it could be said that the extraordinarily complex and inhumanly numerous Chinese characters are by their very nature inconvenient, and that when one does not know or remember some or all of the Chinese characters, “the Chinese characters cannot be used” in those situations…

The above-mentioned Awake! article mentions this historical milestone involving Hangul:

Finally, there was a Bible in Korean that could be read by nearly anyone​—even by women and children who had never had the opportunity to learn Chinese characters.

Many Mandarin field language learners, and literally tens of millions of Chinese people around the world as well, have also not learned Chinese characters. Will there ever be a Bible that uses Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together of} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) as its main writing system, and not just as a small-print pronunciation aid for the Chinese characters? Perhaps time will tell.

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Culture Language Learning Science Theocratic

yīnyì

yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

Appendix A2 of the English New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (Study Edition), entitled “Features of This Revision”, discusses vocabulary changes that have been made in the current revision, words that have been translated differently than before. As noted in various entries in the excellent resource Referenced Theo. Expressions (RTE), Appendix A2 of the current Mandarin version of the New World Translation Bible (nwtsty) correspondingly discusses words that have been translated differently in the current revision of the Mandarin NWT Bible, compared to how they had been translated before.

Since we base what we say in Jehovah’s service on his Word the Bible, the vocabulary used in it—and the way those vocabulary words are translated—should be reflected in how we speak in our ministry, at our meetings, etc. So, it is beneficial for us Mandarin field language learners to be familiar with the latest thinking from the organization on how Bible terms should be translated into Mandarin.

Units of Measurement

Appendix A2 of the current Mandarin version of the New World Translation Bible (nwtsty) points out that in previous editions of the Mandarin New World Translation, basically metric system units of measurement were used, although sometimes units from the original language were used. However, the whole number metric measurements that were considered best to use in the main text generally ended up being inexact conversions from the original measurements. Also, some metric units of measurement are named differently in different places. For example, some places use “mǐ (metre 米)” to mean “metre”, while other places use “gōngchǐ (gōng·chǐ {collective → [metric]} · {Chinese foot (⅓ of a metre)} → [metre] 公尺)”. So, the current version of the Mandarin NWT in most scriptures uses the original language units of measurement through what in Mandarin is called “yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯)”, and in footnotes it provides the metric equivalents and perhaps other information.

What does “yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯)” involve? Some Chinese-English dictionaries say that this word is used to mean either “transliterate”/“transliteration” or “transcribe”/“transcription”. What’s the difference? Is there a difference?

[Note on terminology: “Writing system” and “script” are synonymous, while an “orthography” is a “set of conventions [connected to a writing system/script] for writing a language, including norms of spelling, capitalization, emphasis, hyphenation, punctuation, and word breaks”.]

Transliteration?

The Wikipedia page on transliteration provides the following summaries to help define transliteration:

Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus trans- + liter-) in predictable ways

Transliteration is not primarily concerned with representing the sounds of the original but rather with representing the characters, ideally accurately and unambiguously.

Systematic transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, typically grapheme to grapheme [e.g., letter to letter]. Most transliteration systems are one-to-one, so a reader who knows the system can reconstruct the original spelling.

Echoing the above quote, the academic paper “Two Steps Toward Digraphia in China” (Sino-Platonic Paper Number 134), by Xieyan Hincha, provides this rigorous definition of transliteration:

By transliteration is meant the letter-by-letter conversion of a text written in an alphabet into another alphabetical script, if necessary using diacritical marks, in such a way that the text can be correctly converted back into the original text by means of a transliteration table.

Transcription?

Now, compare the above to summaries provided by the Wikipedia page on transcription that help to define transcription:

Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of spoken language in written form.

There are two main types of linguistic transcription. Phonetic transcription focuses on phonetic and phonological properties of spoken language. Systems for phonetic transcription thus furnish rules for mapping individual sounds or phones to written symbols. Systems for orthographic transcription, by contrast, consist of rules for mapping spoken words onto written forms as prescribed by the orthography of a given language. Phonetic transcription operates with specially defined character sets, usually the International Phonetic Alphabet. [emphasis added]

The above-mentioned academic paper “Two Steps Toward Digraphia in China” also provides a rigorous definition for transcription, which seems to specifically refer to phonetic transcription, as referred to in the Wikipedia quote above:

It is time to ask what exactly is a transcription system. It is a graphic system whose elements unambiguously represent the sounds of a spoken language. The transcription can be narrow or broad: in both cases one graphic symbol represents in principle precisely one single sound.

“There is Too Much…Let Me Sum Up”


To sum up, basically transliteration refers to mapping from one writing system to another writing system, while transcription refers to mapping from a language’s sounds to a graphic system like the IPA (phonetic transcription), or to a writing system with an orthography (orthographic transcription).

Thus, I would say that it’s not really appropriate to use “yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯)”—which literally means “sound translating”—to mean “transliterate” or “transliteration”. From the literal meanings of its morphemes, “yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translating → [transcribing | transcription] 音译 音譯)” is a much better fit for meaning “transcribe” or “transcription”, which refer to mapping the sounds of a language to a graphic system or a writing system.

Going back to Appendix A2 of the current Mandarin version of the NWT Bible, when it says that this version in most scriptures yīnyì (yīn·yì sound · translates → [transcribes] 音译 音譯) (transcribes) the original language’s units of measurement, that means that it uses Chinese characters/Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) to represent (as well as they can) how these units of measurement sounded in the original language. For example, the original language unit of measurement translated into English as “seah measure” is translated into Mandarin as “xìyà ({seah (measure)} 细亚 細亞)”.—2 Kings 7:1 (English/Mandarin).

Transliteration, Transcription, and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)

Besides offering definitions of transliteration and transcription, the academic paper “Two Steps Toward Digraphia in China” mentioned above also discusses whether these terms apply to Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音). Here are a couple of quotes:

In the case of Chinese characters, ISO has established that a transliteration between Chinese characters and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is impossible: the supposedly more than 40,000 (“ideo-phonographic”) characters cannot be represented by the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet. There is no doubt about that. This clearly shows that Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Fāng’àn (Fāng’·àn {Direction → [Method]} · {Long, Narrow Table or Desk → [Plan]} 方案) is not a transliteration system, because it does not fulfill all the criteria of a transliteration system.

If Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Fāng’àn (Fāng’·àn {Direction → [Method]} · {Long, Narrow Table or Desk → [Plan]} 方案) were a transcription system, this table would contain three state-prescribed violations of the transcription principle, namely: y+i, y+in, and y+ing. In all three of these cases, two letters represent one sound. The same is true when writing y+u and w+u. This rule does not concern phonetic transcription; rather, it is an orthographic rule: in these cases <y> and <w> are artificial and arbitrary initial symbols. But phonetically these are not consonants. Consequently, in this respect Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Fāng’àn (Fāng’·àn {Direction → [Method]} · {Long, Narrow Table or Desk → [Plan]} 方案) is not a transcription system.

The above quote explains that Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) does not qualify as a phonetic transcription system. However, it shows that Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) has orthographic rules connected to it, meaning it could be used for orthographic transcription…

No, Could It Be?

So, this academic paper concludes that Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) is not a system for transliterating Chinese characters, nor is it a system for phonetically transcribing Mandarin speech. What is it, then? The paper comes to this conclusion:

As is well known, the Chinese leadership refuses to recognize Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) as a script and to permit digraphia [the state of having two standard scripts, Chinese characters and Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音)]. But scientific facts demonstrate that Hànyǔ (Hàn·yǔ {Han (Chinese)} · Language → [(Modern Standard) Mandarin] 汉语 漢語) Pīnyīn (Pīn·yīn {Piecing Together} · Sounds → [Pinyin] 拼音) Fāng’àn (Fāng’·àn {Direction → [Method]} · {Long, Narrow Table or Desk → [Plan]} 方案), including its orthography, is a writing system for Chinese. [emphasis added]