Ah, Chinese Transliteration. One of the banes of my existence. I had to read "Judge Dee" in high school (Asian Studies - I grew up in Hawaii) and the nomenclature drove me up the wall, not least because it made the Chinese sound like children.
The Wade-Giles romanization system is vastly superior to whatever "system" was used in the text of Judge Dee, but Pinyin is both simpler to read and more accurate in representing the sound of the language. (Mandarin dialect, of course - China has had millennia to develop class distinction and provincial snobbishness into an art, as my grandmother's attitude towards Cantonese attests.) The only thing to keep in mind with Pinyin is that it was based on cyrillic, so "Cao Cao" isn't prounced "Cow Cow", but "Tsao Tsao". That's an edge case where I feel Wade-Giles actually is superior for English-language readers.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2006-06-13 04:05 pm (UTC)The Wade-Giles romanization system is vastly superior to whatever "system" was used in the text of Judge Dee, but Pinyin is both simpler to read and more accurate in representing the sound of the language. (Mandarin dialect, of course - China has had millennia to develop class distinction and provincial snobbishness into an art, as my grandmother's attitude towards Cantonese attests.) The only thing to keep in mind with Pinyin is that it was based on cyrillic, so "Cao Cao" isn't prounced "Cow Cow", but "Tsao Tsao". That's an edge case where I feel Wade-Giles actually is superior for English-language readers.