Some years ago, one of my colleagues in Chinese studies amused us over the internet with a humorous maxim that he had come up with. It was that there are three sure signs by which you can tell that a Sinologist has finally crossed over the borderline that separates Genius from Madness. The three are:
(1) he or she invents a new system of alphabetic transcription for Chinese;
(2) he or she comes out with a new translation of the Dao De Jing (道德經); or
(3) he or she is occupied in any way whatsoever with the Yi Jing (易經).
Now, this really is a good joke, and fully deserves the insider’s laugh which it invariably evokes. But I’m afraid you have to be a rather ‘funny’ kind of person to appreciate just how funny it is. You have to be...a Sinologist.
The second and third points are amusing to insiders because they remind us of the particular arrogance that many of us picked up, or at least learned to pretend to pick up, in the process of becoming initiates in this field. The idea is that the Dao De Jing and the Yi Jing, perhaps the only two Chinese books that non-sinologists really are fairly likely to have heard of, may even in some sense ‘believe in’ – are by that very fact too vulgar to be worthy of a true scholar’s attention. Perhaps there is also a hint that a ‘true’ Sinologist should have nothing but the purest, most abstractly intellectual interest in ‘the field’ in strict separation from personal life: he or she should have absolutely no personal or ‘private’ involvement along the lines of ‘believing in’ Chinese philosophy, ‘consulting’ the Yi Jing, or the like. (Writing these lines, I now wonder whether my own form of this ‘elitist’ approach comes out in the way that even after more than forty years in ‘the field,’ I still prefer to eat Chinese food, if and when I am compelled to eat it, with a knife and fork rather than with chopsticks...)
But what about the first point? What would be so strange about inventing a new transcription system? To begin with, the full, obvious, and hopeless pointlessness of it. I have not gone to the trouble to conduct a survey among my colleagues on this, but let’s just suppose I did. Suppose I sent a hundred sinologists the question: ‘If one of our most famous colleagues, after decades of study and research, invented a new and improved system for spelling Chinese words and names in our alphabet...would you be interested in learning it and, potentially, starting to use it in your own publications?’ I would be amazed if even two out of the hundred responded in the affirmative. (Actually, to be honest, I would be surprised if even ten of the hundred responded at all. It is part of the standard ‘professional’ image nowadays not to have time to respond to emails.) The 98 who, like me, would immediately dismiss the whole idea as idiocy would reason thus:
(1) there are already too many different competing transcriptions in the world; and
(2) there is not, nor will there ever be, any such thing as a really satisfactory one for all purposes.
As for there being ‘many different’ transcriptions, I would not venture to say how many there are; perhaps nobody knows; but it would seem practically every Western language has produced at least one new system of its own. In Dutch alone, there are at least three that I know of. The title of the Song-dynasty philosophical handbook 近思錄, which Olaf Graf called ‘The Song-Confucianist Summa’ and which is one of my favorite books in Chinese, appears in Graf’s German translation as Djin-sï lu. In the present-day official standard transcription used in Mainland China, called Hanyu pinyin 漢語拼音or just pinyin, it would be Jinsilu. In the transcription I learned when I started studying Chinese at Harvard, it would be Jinn-sy Luh.
To an experienced Sinologue, of course, there is no difference between Djin-sï lu and Jinsilu or Jinn-sy Luh, just as he or she can see at a glance that Zhu Xi, Ju Shi, Chu Hsi, Tchou Hi, Dschu Hsi and Tsjoe Sji are all the same – nothing but variant spellings of the name of 朱熹 (1130-1200), the all-time kingpin of ‘straight’ (i.e. non-New Age) Chinese philosophy and the more famous of the book’s two editors.
In the course of time, due to the ever-growing influence of Anglophone culture on the world scene since the nineteenth century, the quaint-looking English transcription called the ‘Wade-Giles System’ came into widespread use even outside sinological circles. [1] The orthodox Wade-Giles spelling is complex and cumbersome: not only are many consonants followed by an apostrophe which it is totally inadmissible to delete (tang and t’ang are two entirely different words), but the apostrophe itself is supposed to be turned around to face in the opposite direction to a normal apostrophe – a typographical gymnastic which I do not even know how to do on a computer. In addition, there are supposed to be ‘circumflex’ and ‘breve’ accent marks above certain vowels; these contribute nothing to the distinctive identifiability of the syllables and are often quietly deleted.
In practice, the Wade-Giles ‘system’ has become a loose family of systems more or less following the overall rule that an apostrophe is used to distinguish what are called the ‘aspirated’ consonants from the ‘non-aspirated.’ (Since even this supposedly crucial feature is often actually not observed, perhaps we are left with the fact that certain syllables begin with hs- as the one and only universal touchstone of Wade-Gilesness. (On second thought, that won’t work either: Graf uses it in his German transcription as well...)
In practice, a slightly simplified version of the transcription, using a regular rather than an inverted apostrophe and deleting the superfluous diacritic marks over the vowels, is the most common form of ‘Wade-Giles spelling’ still used today. A sinological writer who adopts these simplifications is not truly ‘inventing a new transcription’ – hence not, at least by the three criteria mentioned at the beginning of this little essay, ipso facto in need of immediate psychiatric attention.
It is not always easy to tell what constitutes a truly ‘new’ transcription. A few months ago I experienced a spectacular example of this. I was aware that Sir Joseph Needham, author of the incomparable 24-volume Science and Civilisation in China Needham Needham Needham
[to be continued]
[1] According to Yuen Ren Chao 趙元任 in the introduction to his Mandarin Primer, the system was first published by Sir Thomas Francis Wade in 1859, subsequently revised, and adopted in Herbert Giles’ 1912 Chinese-English Dictionary.
