Ever listen to what Western newscasters do with the Pinyin C, Q, X and Z, just to name a few?

The point is that every romanization has its own rules for converting the letters into sounds (or for representing the sounds graphically). People who don’t know the rules for a given system aren’t going to be able to do either correctly.

Maybe you should find out a little bit about who Wade and Giles were before you start complaining about their grasp on the language.

The intention of the Wade-Giles system may be one of aspiration, not voicing (I wouldn’t know, I’m not a linguist, just a polyglot). I just worked for a guy once – he learned on the old Wade-Giles system, and had been in Taiwan for maybe 40 or 50 years, and often spoke in public in Mandarin. Many words that should have been a hard g, he pronounced as a k, and insisted that that was the right way to say it, because in his romanisation it was shown as a k. I worked closely with this guy for 3 years, and so was able to observe his usage in many different situations, both in formal and casual usage. Since I was hearing something different from him from what I was then learning in class, I decided to check it out, and compared the Pinyin, Zhuyin, and Wade-Giles systems. Based on his (apparent misinterpretation of) Wade-Giles, I formed my current opinion of the system being an inadequate early attempt by outsiders with wooden ears to transcribe the sounds they were hearing.

All of this is a tangent, however. The main issue for both of us is why do Western authors still feel compelled to use a romanization that seriously does not do the job properly. I find it distracting, and probably would not read such a book unless I could get a digital copy and search-and-replace the romanization to make it more readable.

I’m guessing that you ARE a linguist :) When I started writing my last post, I didn’t notice that you were the same person in the 2 previous posts until I had just about finished responding. My bad.

I think who created a romanization has everything to do with the question at hand: if someone has a less-than-perfect grasp of the sounds and structure of the language at hand, they’re not going to do a very good job. Case in point: There are some very popular booklets in China for learning “English” by memorizing sets of Chinese characters that supposedly have the same sounds as the English phrases.
You end up with stuff like “weila ali you fulong?” for “where are you from?”. Same problem, opposite direction.

The difference between Mandarin “G” and “K” is one of aspiration, not voicing. “K” is aspirated, “G” is not. That aspiration is what the apostrophe represents in Wade-Giles. That usage isn’t intuitive, which is why it confuses most people. (But Pinyin in its turn actually gives a wrong impression, that it shows a voicing distinction between sounds.)

Pinyin IS the superior romanization for Mandarin, but that fact has nothing at all to do with WHO created it. Not that you’ll let that stop your jingo-jango.

I have no problem with either trying to be historically accurate with the sounds of names or with using modern pronunciation. The problem is in using a colonial British system which has never been used by locals but only by foreigners, and which by it’s very structure was apparently invented by someone that didn’t even have a firm grasp of the language. (for example, the hard “g” sound in most words is replaced by a “k” in wade-giles…which is very grating, as in: I’m koing to learn to play the kuitar someday).

Japanese doesn’t seem to have this problem as much…but all I know about this issue for Japanese I learned from Wikipedia, so maybe I’m just ignorant :)

Most high school students (AFAIK) take at least one “Classics” course (古文 or 古典) in which they study the rudiments of the language of the Heian Period (9th~12th centuries or so) in order to be able to read and gain some familiarity with the most famous writings from the era. Now while we don’t know exactly how the language was pronounced then, we do know that it was very different. But since the writing system is basically the same (the variety in the original kanji and kana is normalized to a modern standard in the HS textbooks), students are taught to use a modern pronunciation when reading the texts aloud. This is equivalent to someone studying Beowulf or Chaucer and reading the text with a modern American pronunciation. Or reading Caesar or Cicero like Italian. It’s a perfectly understandable expedient, but it isn’t correct.

Any author who writes a fictional tale about 8th-century China or Heian Japan and represents the names in the pinyin or Hepburn romanization of the modern pronunciations is just being lazy. And that’s no author I want to read.

I could have a better discussion about Japanese or Spanish …

WRONG!

I’ve only read parts of the first volume of the Wingrove series, but since I learned Chinese using Pinyin, his use of Wade-Giles gave me hives. Made no sense at all, to use a less accurate, NON-CHINESE-DEVELOPED transliteration scheme. Gah! :)

It’s much more accurate, it’s much more common, and not using it makes books seem like they were written at least half a century ago – very obsolete usage. It would be like using American slang from the 50′s or earlier and trying to pass it off as a modern dialogue.

so: Tang, not T’ang. What did the apostrophe ever do to you that you would want to abuse it so?