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

[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.