ACRL News Issue (B) of College & Research Libraries


1064 / C & R L N ew s ■ D e c e m b e r  2001

Romanization for a monosyllabic script?

The alphabetical system devised for transliterating 
Chinese characters is called romanization. Tradition­
ally, the Wade-Giles system has been most widely 
accepted by international scholars. However, a new 
romanized alphabet, pinyin, was officially adopted 
by China in 1958 and has been increasingly used in 
classrooms and mass media. Ulis change has had a 
significant impact in the library world as Wade- 
Giles romanization has been used in cataloging pro­
cedures for many decades. In 2000, the Library of 
Congress officially adopted the pinyin system and 
most other libraries have followed suit.

The University of California Irvine (UCI) Li­
braries has launched a romanization conver­
sion project. To commemorate this occasion, 
the East Asian Collection organized an exhibit, 
which was inspired by noted historian Arnold 
Joseph Toynbee’s work on the merits of ideo­
grams over romanized script.

Toynbee once wrote: “. . . by the time that 
my great-granddaughter who is now aged four 
or five, reaches my own present age o f eighty- 
two, a drastically reduced and simplified set of 
the Chinese characters were to have become 
the worldwide visual code for international com­
munication, just as the so-called Arabic numerals 
have become the worldwide code for writing num­
bers.”1

He then went on to emphasize the merits 
o f ideograms, i.e., Chinese characters. The 
popular alphabetical system of writing, be­
cause it is based on sounds, rather than se­
mantic concepts has the same limitation that 
spoken language does: speakers o f different 
languages, or even widely divergent dialects 
o f the same language, often find it difficult or 
impossible to communicate with each other. 
Even readers of any single language may have 
problems in communication due to changes 
of pronunciation that have occurred in the 
course of time. In contrast, Chinese ideograms, 
because they are independent of pronuncia­
tion, provide a mutually comprehensible lan­
guage for speakers of varied Chinese dialects 
(the spoken forms of which may not be mu­
tually comprehensible).

Chinese writing, like that of many ancient 
civilizations, originated in the form o f simple 
pictographs. As the number o f characters ex­
panded, new characters were built upon ear­
lier words with the same approximate sound 
plus the addition of a categorizing component. While

other languages have changed to adopt an al­
phabetic or syllabic system of writing, at least 
in part, Chinese people have maintained a tra­
dition of ideograms. A partial explanation could 
be that Chinese is considered, by and large, a 
monosyllabic language. In the evolution o f the 
language, the Chinese syllable also has devel­
oped an increasingly simple phonetic structure. 
Except for a few words that begin with vow ­
els, most syllables begin with a consonant or a 
consonant cluster. The cluster is usually simple, 
consisting at most of a stop, a fricative, an as­
piration, and a semivowel. After the consonant 
or consonant cluster there is a main vowel, 
with or without a final consonant or semivowel. 
The complicated pictographic writing form has 
become a necessity for a simple phonetically 
structured language.

In addition to consonants and vowels, there 
is a third constituent element o f the Chinese 
word. This is the height and movement of the 
fundamental pitch of the voice, known as tone. 
Tones have often been described as a device 
to distinguish otherwise identical words. There 
are four tones in Mandarin, or Standard Chi­
nese. Local dialects may have a range of five 
to nine different tones. This feature of tones 
introduces another dimension o f variation in 
a generally monosyllabic language.

Ideograms, or “square scripts” as Chinese is 
usually referred to, are particularly well-suited 
for parallels, couplets, and palindromes in lit- 
erature. Meanwhile, the monosyllable and tone 
characteristics may also create short essays with 
one sound and one rhyme. UCI’s exhibit fea­
tured examples of classical texts that illustrate 
characters understandable as written forms, but 
with content that would be unintelligible if read 
aloud.

UCI’s East Asian Collection organized the 
exhibit to remind our viewers of the Toynbee 
theory. We feel romanization is only a tempo­
rary substitute for ideograms. Making the origi­
nal script or character accessible online is our 
ultimate goal.

Note
1. Arnold J. Toynbee, Surviving the Future 

(New York, Oxford University Press, 1971), 102.
— William Sheh Wong, Asian Studies librar­

ian, University o f California Libraries, Irvine, 
e-mail: wswong@uci.edu ■

mailto:ivswong@uci.edu