A Sample in Good Old

The text below is done by the famous poet and Sung dynasty official Su Shih (Tung-P'o). The romanization is in "National Roman Characters" Gwoyeu Romatzyh (Kuo-yu Lo-ma Tzu/Guoyu Loma Zi), invented by the famous Chinese linguist Chao Yuen-ren (in the twenties of the last century) or at least most closely associated with his name. It is a finely crafted system of romanization that shows his handiwork and insights in many places. Although Gwoyeu Romatzyh, IMHO, doesn't at all seem too complicated for people really interested in (and - like myself - able to get familiar with in a couple of hours), it never had been a widely used system. After having been adopted by the Nationalist government early on, it was soon followed by the Pinyin system introduced and spread by Communist China. Taiwan had been using GR until recently, but now is also turning toward Pinyin, which isn't too bad a system for modern purposes. But shouldn't "the better" always be the enemy of "the good"?
Too sad that politicians don't go for this maxime and some people even seem to become enraged merely on seeing it in print or hearing it praised.
GR was the subject of vociferous attacks by the Communists almost from the beginning and for reasons of Communist face it looks like that it can never be promulgated again. (Today, daring to use Romatzyh marks the cranky Western scholar as someone who cares a great deal about language and is willing to take the trouble to indicate tones in print. And perhaps also as one who is not willing to let politicians dictate his or her choice of scholarly tools.)

The great value of Romatzyh is that tonal distinctions are ineradicably built into the spelling of all syllables, and so anyone who can remember the letters of the alphabet can remember the tones of the words, which seems to be much easier for many Westerners than remembering diacritic marks. Unlike with Pinyin which allows to drop the diacritic marks or tone numbers, one is forced by GR to remember the tones when writing, otherwise the words cannot be expressed.
Moreover, in our time of computerized texts and Internet the "old" GR-system doesn't at all look "old-fashioned" but quite modern and appropriate because not using special characters but simple ASCII-code.
Additionally, although I didn't calculate a ratio comparing the necessary key-strokes for a given text in Pinyin and Gwoyeu Romatzyh to provide the same tonal information, I'd bet that GR will be the winner!

Chao Yuen-ren proved to be a real ingenious and inventive scholar dedicated to linguistic "fieldwork" on phonology. Unlike e.g. the famous Swedish linguist Karlgren, "his" system of romanization is to give the pronunciation of modern "Mandarin" (Guo yu/Putonghua) rather than providing orthographic hints on historical language.

So, just try to learn the couple of Gwoyeu Romatzyh rules - and you'll see, they're all pretty clever and well-founded, e.g. the exception for words with the sonorant initials m-, n-, l- and r-:

Their basic forms have second tone instead of first tone! Why? Please go and count that kind of words in first tone in the text below!

Yet, remember, Gwoyeu Romatzyh can't be nothing else than a tool.

Good to still having the unique beauty of the Chinese characters !
Reading them, is like switching the light on !

 


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since December 2000


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