Pinyin Perils

Groans from the libraries

"Xurely you zhest," wrote Nancy May in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe. "Now 1 have trouble with dzylophone and dzerox, and I still can't pronounce Xiaoping." Eugene Wu, director of Harvard University's Yenching Library, sounded depressed. "I don't even want to think about it," he moaned.

Ms. May's oddly spelled worry and Mr. Wu's woe were both responses to the virtually worldwide acceptance by news organizations and academic institutions of a different system of spelling Chinese names in English, called Pinyin. The changeover was started by Peking (um, er, Beijing) on Jan. 1, when the government of Zhongguo (otherwise known as China) decreed that in all its foreign-language publications Pinyin would replace the traditional Wade-Giles system of romanization. Agencies of U.S., British, French and other Western governments subsequently followed suit, as did news media around the world, including TIME. (One notable exception: London's Daily Telegraph, which until January of this year still quaintly referred to Iran as "Persia"). Readers of newspapers and magazines were being forced to puzzle out such Sinological oddities as Guangzhou (Canton), Xizang (Tibet) and Nei Mong-gol (Inner Mongolia).

The most complaints, however, came from librarians, geographers and other academics who specialize in the Middle Kingdom. Libraries seemed to be hardest hit by the switch to Pinyin (Chinese for "phonetic spelling"), with its odd-looking q's, x's and zh's, as they contemplated making millions of changes in card catalogues. The Harvard-Yenching Library, for example, has more than half a million cards in its catalogue, all recorded in Wade-Giles. "We cannot possibly cope with such a change now," says Librarian Wu. Similarly discouraged was the head archivist of the oriental manuscripts section of France's largest library, the Bibliotheque Nationale, who found Pinyin "unreliable" and, with true Gallic pride, "terrible for French."

"Pinyin is the biggest problem we have ever faced," said Richard R. Randall, executive secretary of the U.S. Board on Geographic Names. The board will have to alter thousands of traditional spellings on now outdated Chinese maps. Among the unhappy Sinologists was Tufts University Professor Donald Klein. Said he: "It's driving me up the wall. It's hard enough to get my students to remember such names as the Yangtze River. If I now have to change it to Chang Jiang, it would confuse them beyond hope."

The U.N. has switched to Pinyin, which some scholars regard as more accurate than Wade-Giles as a way of transcribing Chinese sounds. Taiwan has no plans to switch, since it sees the adoption of Pinyin as an acceptance of Communist claims. Others have more personal reasons. "If they want to call Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing 'Deng Xiaoping,' that's their business," grumped Boston Globe Columnist Anthony Spinazzola. "I don't have to order him in a restaurant." Which is something to qew on.

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