Chinese Name - Spelling

Spelling

The process of converting Chinese names into a phonetic alphabet is called romanization.

In mainland China, Chinese names have been romanized using the Hanyu Pinyin system since 1958. Although experiments with the complete conversion of Chinese to the pinyin alphabet failed, it remains in common use and has become the transcription system of the government of Singapore, the United Nations, and the International Organization of Standardization. After many decades of avoiding its use, Taiwan formally adopted pinyin as its "New Phonetic System" in 2009, although it continues to allow its citizens to use other romanizations on official documents such as passports. The Russian-influenced system is easily identified by its pronounced use of uncommon letters such as "q", "x", and "z"; when tones are included, they are noted via tone marks. In pinyin, 毛泽东 is written Mao Zedong.

Proper use of pinyin romanization means treating the surname and given name as precisely two separate words with no spaces between the letters of multiple characters. For example, "王秀英" is properly rendered either with its tone marks as "Wáng Xiùyīng" or without as "Wang Xiuying", but should not be written as "Wang Xiu Ying", "Wang XiuYing", "Wangxiuying", and so on. In the rare cases where a surname consists of more than one character, it too should be written as a unit: "Sima Qian", not "Si Ma Qian" or "Si Maqian". However, as the Chinese language makes almost no use of spaces, native speakers often do not know these rules and simply space between each character of their name, causing those used to phonetically spelled languages think of the xing and ming as three words instead of two.

The switch to pinyin is still quite new for Taiwan and many non-standard spellings continue to be found, including "Lee" and "Soong". Similarly, many Taiwanese and historic names still employ the older Wade–Giles system. This English-influenced system is identified by its use of the digraphs "hs" (for the pinyin x) and "ts" (for the pinyin z and c) and by its use of hyphens to connect the syllables of multi-character words. Correct reading depends on the inclusion of superscript numbers and the use of apostrophes to distinguish between different consonants, but in practice both of these are commonly omitted. In Wade–Giles, 毛泽东 is written Mao Tse-tung, as the system hyphenates names between the characters. For example, Wang Xiuying and Sima Qian are written in Wade as "Wang Hsiu-Ying" and "Ssu-ma Ch'ien".

Pinyin and Wade are both based on the pronunciations of the Beijing dialect or Mandarin Chinese. In Hong Kong, Macao, and the diaspora communities in southeast Asia and abroad, the Chinese often romanize according to the sounds of their own languages, particularly Cantonese, Hokkien, and Hakka. This occurs amid a plethora of competing romanization systems. In Hong Kong, many Chinese who grew up under the British occupation adopted English spelling conventions for their names: "Lee" for Li, "Shaw" for Shao, and so forth. In Macao, Chinese names are similarly sometimes still transliterated based on Portuguese orthography. The Chinese from the diaspora communities in Malaysia and Singapore fully divide the characters in their names with spaces as a matter of course.

A final point is that – although characters have remained roughly the same since the Han dynasty and some classical grammar is still part of the core curriculum of Chinese secondary schools – vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation have all changed from Old to Middle to Modern Chinese even within the prestige dialects. Thus, although modern Chinese read "Confucius" (孔夫子) as Kǒng Fūzǐ, the same title would have been Khuwng Pjutsi in the Tang dynasty and was probably something like an atonal Khongʔ Patsəʔ during his lifetime. Of course, at the time, he would have been addressed by his courtesy name Trungsnərs (仲尼, Zhòngní) instead.