A quick and dirty resource for proper pinyin (romanization of Chinese)

[superborb]

In particular, figuring out how to group words in pinyin is hard! So I wanted to write a reference for myself too. The goal of all these rules is to make it easier to read. There are other systems to romanize Chinese, but as MDZS / the Untamed are from mainland China, pinyin is the official way. This was written with an eye to common use cases in fic with untranslatable words or concepts. Also, like, do whatever you want, this is if you want to do it ~properly~.

Names: I'll use Wei Wuxian as an example. That was the proper way. Camel case (Wei WuXian) and separating the words (Wei Wu Xian) are incorrect.

Names with prefixes: The prefix is separated and capitalized. (Exception: historical figures like Kongzi (Confucius) are written together.) Therefore, it is properly written A Yuan. I know it looks weird. Sorry.

Names with titles: The titles following the name are separated and uncapitalized. Wei qianbei, Lan xiansheng. I know it looks even weirder. Sorry.

Place names: The distinguishing and the general "what this is" part are separated and both are capitalized. Jinlin Tai is correct because "Jinlin" is the distinguishing name for it and "Tai" means tower.

Proper nouns: In general, capitalization follows the same "proper nouns are capitalized" concept as English. Since Chenqing would be a proper noun in English, we capitalize it.

Grouping: Modern Chinese is polysyllabic, despite popular misconception. Therefore, you space pinyin based on words with a single meaning. There can be ambiguity here! Older brother (gege), martial older sister (shijie) are written in a group and uncapitalized. Words with more than four syllables are separated if possible.

If the group results in ambiguity, an apostrophe is used to separate the syllables (second syllable starts with a, o, or e). E.g. pingan could be pin+gan or ping+an, so you'd write ping'an to disambiguate. This is also why the city of Xi'an is written with an apostrophe -- otherwise it could be the single syllable xian.

ETA: Prefixes for non-names: These get grouped with the word they modify. Therefore, ajie is technically correct.

Hopefully that was helpful! It gets a lot more complicated, but this covers most of the common cases I've seen in fic.

ETA2: An update to point out that this is the "official" PRC Pinyin rules, and people may/may not follow them IRL and of course there are different rules in other countries! And I personally wouldn't necessarily follow all the rules (A Yuan could be ambiguous in English for example), but it's nice to break rules on purpose instead of accidentally.

Comments

[shati]

My meager few years of Mandarin classes understandably didn't go into much depth on spacing/case in pinyin, so this is super helpful for me, ty!

Tbh spaces for the titles seem more natural to me than dashes -- I was wondering if the heavy dash use in English language fic was influenced by anime fandom, but that's a wild guess. (I can also understand why people would use them, or other non-pinyin conventions, I just wanted to defend the spaces.)

[superborb]

Yeah, my strong hypothesis is that fandom borrowed the dashes from anime fandom, since they're using it with titles the same way Japanese does.

I totally get why people add spaces or dashes or whatever; it's not like this standard is particularly strong. Like, depending on when and where you diaspora'd from, you may not even have learned pinyin, or you may have learned a different version of pinyin. So there isn't a lot of consistency!

[rekishi]

Mh interesting. I've actually had this discussion with my intern a few weeks ago, because of Japanese etiquette, and since she grew up speaking Chinese I tried to make the comparison and completely failed. That's when I learned that pinyin does not do this, actually.

I'm pretty sure people get it from Japanese Romanji, where honorifics always get dashed onto the name. Plus I believe the Exiled Rebels translations also used dashes (I need to still read it but I think I saw it during converting the files a couple of times). Heck, even the go-to fandom meta writers on tumblr, who I think are largely American-born Chinese, use dashes. I've also seen apostrophes used for the same purpose, but that looks weird to me because apostrophes serve different functions.

I think it has less to do with convention as such as how the eye tracks things and what our language understanding is. When you see "A Yuan" it can also be the indeterminate article "a". Which then makes it additionally confusing (I'm currently in a weird position where I need to have JC talk about JFM as 爹/die but unfortunately English has already two (three?) different die words that are pronounced wildly differently from 爹/die). The dash makes it looks more organically to someone trained only on western languages. Which is funny, because of course western honorifics and titles never get a dash (it's not Queen-Elizabeth, after all, or Mr-Smith).

[superborb]

Yeah, this post was mostly to present the "PRC Pinyin" proprieties, even though a lot of them look strange to our English eyes. It's the uh, know when you're breaking rules thing? Like, my philosophy is always if you deviate, you should know why and do it for a reason; so A-Yuan for disambiguation makes sense. (But of course people can do whatever they want etc etc)

[rekishi]

Honestly, I know too little about Chinese both linguistically and from a learning perspective to make any calls here. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I always appreciate these background posts, exactly because I personally have no Chinese background. It's also interesting in this specific cause, because I've seen it written differently by different people. I prefer making informed calls on stuff (and having options, heh), and I can't bother my various colleagues with language questions without having to explain why. XD

[superborb]

Yeah, in addition to the standard being different outside of China, people also don't really strictly follow it within China either haha

[rekishi]

:D

Now I have a question though, so is it Baoshan sanren, Baoshan Sanren, or Baoshan-sanren (by the 'we stole this from Romanji' logic)? Because I understand the sanren is a title of sorts (wanderer), because I think the subs say Baoshan Sanren, but the Netflix subs have....issues.

[superborb]

The whole thing is her courtesy name, so it is "Baoshan Sanren" and can't be broken down further, e.g. "Baoshan" alone is not meaningful, though since we aren't given other names for her, I understand why people do it

[rekishi]

Thank you ❤

[everysecondtuesday]

So this is the comment I warned you was coming on Discord but then failed to have time to finish writing up until this morning. I have some questions, some of which are wanting to confirm I'm correctly understanding you and some of which are genuine confusion (and again, feel free to ignore them if you don't have the time/energy!).

So in Scum Villain's Self Saving System, is it safe to assume that Mobei Jun (who is the Northern demon king) is actually his full title and thus should be "Mobei Jun" and not "Mobei jun" (sort of like with "Cangse Sanren" in an above comment, I think)? Also, Zhuzhi lang is given the title "lang" to add to his name, but Zhuzhi is his name, iirc, so that would actually be "Zhuzhi lang"?

There can be ambiguity here! Older brother (gege), martial older sister (shijie) are written in a group and uncapitalized.
This makes sense to me if it's a suffix or using the word regularly ("My shijie" or "Lan gege"), but what about when you turn it into a proper noun/use it in place of a name? Would it then follow the same rules as e.g. "father"? Capitalized when it's a proper noun, lowercase otherwise? Or would it still be lowercase even though it's a proper noun? (I didn't skim over the proper noun part of your post. I just am still a bit confused/want to be absolutely sure I'm understanding properly, as the titles thing is very much throwing me capitalization-wise. Without the connecting -, it feels like it should follow usual English capitalization rules for titles, but it doesn't, and so I am very much aware of how much my instinctive understanding is incorrect.)

Also confirming a spacing thing/general confusion about spacing, because I have seen several different options in subtitles and translations: Would it be correct to have no spaces for things like dashixiong, dage, and erjie as I just wrote them? Or would you use different spacing? (I think I've seen "xiao" off on its own when appended to uncle, while "da" was without spacing in the same translation, so I guess I'm also confused on that and whether it was an error on the translator's part that the two differed or if "xiao" gets its own set of rules thanks to also being a prefix for names the way "a" is. And if that's the case, if you have any good resources on what gets to be an exception?)

Continuing the spacing thing, assuming I've got the right spacing above, I want to be sure I'd be correct about using those things as suffixes. For something like Second Young Master Lan, it would be "Lan ergongzi"? Or for Lan ergege, would it be spaced that way?

What about for things like "sishushu" and "ershidi," where they're used in place of a name/as a proper noun? Would they instead be "Si Shushu" and "Er Shidi"? Also, in the case of where they're used as the name, back to that question about using them as proper nouns and whether or not they're capitalized. Basically, I'm uncertain which of the following would be correct for characters we only know by ranking + relationship: Er shidi, Ershidi, ershidi, or er shidi?

And in response to a different comment, I can't say where the originating of the use of -s for suffixes came from in various cnovel fandoms (which very well may have been adopting the way English handles Japanese suffixes! I know my knowledge of Japanese is why I nodded along and went, "Okay, checks out," and adopted that myself), but for me in particular, I picked it up from the SVSSS canonical tags on AO3 after trying and failing to figure out how it should go from terrible attempts at google searching, asking friends who basically went, "We don't know either /o\" and compare-contrasting like seven different cnovel translations, most of which managed to be different from each other. Which is to say that I am super, super grateful for this post, because it is extremely helpful, and I was basically flailing around confused and hoping I was doing it right. (I was not doing it right.)

Thank you so much for making and sharing this resource!

[superborb]

OK So everything is with the caveat that I'm just reading the PRC Pinyin rules and like, no one says they need to be followed exactly or that it's the only way etc etc

So there are two interpretations: if it's his style name, it should all be capitalized, but if the -jun or -lang are generic titles appended to a name, the title should be uncapitalized. Following that, I think "Mobei Jun" would be correct, bc you'd never just call him "Mobei", while it would be "Zhuzhi lang", bc the name "Zhuzhi" would be fine?

I can't find anything definitive for what you're supposed to do with something like sister or brother when it's used as a proper noun. Even English proper nouns of this sort vary in capitalization according to the style guide you're using... So I think it would depend on if you'd capitalize Sister if you're using it in English. I'll poke around some more, but it might be too edge case for someone to have written about it.

No one REALLY follows pinyin rules strictly I think. But it should be dashixiong, dage, erjie, since a numeral+noun gets written as one unit. (This one I was wrong about before, bc I extrapolated incorrectly from the numeral rules, but http://pinyin.info/readings/yin_binyong/o1_common_nouns.pdf says it should be no spaces.)

So I suppose "Lan ergongzi", "Lan ergege" is formally correct. And either "Sishushu" or "sishushu" depending on how you want to interpret capitalization rules.

Yeah, I mean, often the choices made by this particular pinyin style are unaesthetic or actively confusing (the "A" prefix especially), and like, prescriptivism vs descriptivism etc etc, but I find comfort in being like, "here is the Correct thing, and I'm going to deviate bc of Reasons."

[everysecondtuesday]

That's very helpful, thank you! And yeah, even if I break a rule for the sake of clarity or otherwise, it's good to know that I'm breaking the rule rather than thinking I'm following official standards and ... very much not.