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]

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 ❤