Dr. Chris Wen-Chao Li, in his presentation in January in Taipei, questions the appropriateness of rhetorical debates on the use of Chinese romanization systems. According to Li, recent efforts by the Taiwanese government to standardize Chinese romanization on the island have sparked fierce debates on the relative merits of competing systems, including Pinyin, Wade-Giles, Tongyong and Zhuyin Ershi. Such debates however have been more political than academic, and more often than not appeals are made to nationalistic sentiment. His presentation seeks to redress the balance by examining the issue from a purely linguistic perspective. He lists properties desirable to a transliteration system, as cited by parties to the debate and matches the properties with each of the major Chinese romanization systems for comparison. His finding is that the myriad of properties seen as desirable often contradict each other, and that it is logically impossible to accommodate all of the desired properties within a single transliteration system. In other words, each romanization system represents a compromise of sorts, and the choice between different compromises will have to be based an ordered ranking of desirable properties, which in turn depends on the populace becoming familiar with the full range of criteria used in evaluation and an understanding that many of these properties cannot co-exist. He has proposed that a full list of desirable properties be compiled, and that each property be given a weighting according to its perceived importance by its potential users. The weighting matrix can then be used to calculate a desirability score for each romanization system. Such a quantitative method takes into account all conceivable criteria to date, and is superior to rhetorical debates which focus only on one or two factors and ignore the majority of issues relating to Chinese romanization.
Dr. Chris Wen-Chao Li is assistant professor of Chinese linguistics, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, San Francisco State University.