Victor H. Mair - Pinyin Advocacy

Pinyin Advocacy

Mair is a long-time advocate for writing Mandarin Chinese in an alphabetic script (viz., pinyin).

In the first edition of Sino-Platonic papers (1986), he suggested the publication of a Chinese dictionary arranged in the same familiar way as English, French, or Dungan dictionaries: "single-sort alphabetical arrangement" purely based on the alphabetic spelling of a word, regardless of its morphological structure. Most Chinese words are multisyllabic compounds, where each syllable or morpheme is written with a single Chinese character. Following a two-millennia tradition, Chinese dictionaries – even modern pinyin-based ones like the Xinhua Zidian – are regularly ordered in "sorted-morpheme arrangement" based on the first morpheme (character) in a word. For instance, a Chinese dictionary user who wanted to look up the word Bābāduōsī 巴巴多斯 "Barbados" could find it under ba 巴 in traditional sorted- morpheme ordering (which is easier if one knows the character's appearance or radical but not its pronunciation) or under baba in single-sort alphabetic ordering (which is easier if one knows the pronunciation). The following example is adapted from DeFrancis (2000:10).

• 1bābā 叭叭 on. ① crack! crack! ② snap
• 2bābā 粑粑 n. 〈topo.〉 cake
• 3bābā 吧吧 r.f. 〈topo.〉 loquacious
• 4bābā 巴巴 suf. (of limited occurrence) very; intensely | gān∼ very dry ♦ n./v. poop; doodoo; poopoo ♦ attr. coagulated; forming a crust
• bǎba 㞎㞎 n. 〈coll.〉 excrement (of a baby)
• bàba* 爸爸 n. papa; dad; father
• Bābāduōsī 巴巴多斯 p.w. Barbados
• bābǎi* 八百 num. eight hundred
• bābǎi Luóhàn 八百羅漢 n. 〈Budd.〉 the eight hundred Buddhist saints
• bābàizhījiāo 八拜之交 n. sworn brotherhood
• bābajiejie 巴巴結結 r.f. 〈coll.〉 haltingly; falteringly; barely succeed in handling sth.

In 1990, after unsuccessfully trying to obtain financial support for an alphabetically collated Chinese-English dictionary, Mair organized an international team of linguists and lexicographers who were willing to work as part-time volunteers. Under the editorial leadership of John Defrancis, they published the first general Chinese-English single-sort dictionary in 1996. According to the "Acknowledgments" (1996:ix), "This dictionary owes its genesis to the initiative of Victor H. Mair of Pennsylvania." A revised and expanded edition was published in 2000.