Capitalization
"Romanization" is capitalized in its own Wiki article, and in common use; it should be captitalized in this article's body and title, no? Sharkford 19:45, 2004 Aug 17 (UTC)
Aspiration & Voicelessness
I am fairly certain that English 'd' is not aspirated. If the Mandarin sound is voiced and unaspirated, then 'd' is a quite close transcription. However, I have heard that the Mandarin sound is in fact voiceless and unaspirated, and that's why there's the confusion about transcription systems. -- AdamRaizen 00:24 9 Jul 2003 (UTC)
No response, so I'm changing it. -- AdamRaizen 20:51, 2003 Jul 31 (UTC)
I'm not a native Mandarin speaker (I speak Cantonese), but to me there is no question "Dao" resembles the Chinese pronunciation more accurately. I don't know what "aspirated" and "voiceless" mean exactly, but I was quite surprised to read that both T and D are "equally close" to the Chinese pronunciation. It'd be great if someone who knows both languages and phonology could explain this. Thanks. -- Alan, Jun 3, 04
Alan is right. The Mandarin sound is much closer to D though it is true that Mandarin initials are unvoiced, there is still a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated and the Wade-Giles t/t' pair is unnecessarily misleading and otiose. The Cantonese pronunciation is like "dough" as uttered by Homer Simpson (but still unaspirated). Chen Hansheng Hong Kong Jan 2005
I am a native Mandarin speaker. I am 100% sure that in standard "pu tong hua" the pronunciation of "dao/tao" should be VOICED and ASPRIATED. Thus the English translation "dao" very closely resemble the correct pronunciation. So that paragraph in the article should be removed. Tianran Chen 03:20, 2004 Dec 21 (UTC)
The native Mandarin speaker above is wrong on both counts (not that I doubt your language skills, just your knowledge of phonology.) I'll use pinyin here. The English "d" represents a voiced, unaspirated stop, /d/ in IPA. The English "t" is unvoiced, but at the beginning of a syllable is always aspirated - /th/. Mandarin (and most of the Chinese languages, save I believe the Wu dialects) has no voiced stops - all stops are unvoiced and the distinction is purely one of aspiration. The Mandarin "d" is actually /t/ in IPA (unvoiced, unaspirated) while "t" is /th/, essentially the same as the English "t". The English "d" sounds close enough to the Mandarin "d" that English speakers probably can't perceive the difference, so pinyin uses it in words like "dao". So the two sounds are /t/ ("d" in pinyin) and /th/ ("t" in pinyin). The source of the confusion is that the Wade-Giles transcription uses "t" and "t'" (that's t-apostrophe if it's not clear), respectively, to represent the sounds. The Chinese word "dao" sounds fairly close to "Dow" (as in the chemical company) in English. - Excalibre 05:36, 17 Jan 2005 (UTC)
The meta discussion is at -- AdamRaizen
Re-title
If we must have an entire article about the spelling of [DT]aoism (see history of discussion at Talk:Taoism), is there any objection to renaming it (maybe to Spelling of Daoism?) so that Daoism can be a redirect to Taoism, which actually describes the subject?
It's kind of odd to follow a link expecting to see an article about a philosophy and instead get a diatribe about transcription systems. --Brion 20:31 Sep 3, 2002 (PDT)
- Yeah, but the romanisation issue is a confusing one for people. Wade-Giles is a system for specialists and quite complicated, but the communist pinyin system has some serious clumsiness as well, and political freight that Wade-Giles doesn't have. There are some (myself included) who tend to use W-G for Classical Chinese and pinyin for colloquial or post 1949 pronunciations...
- Fire Star 05:17, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
- This article title ("Taoism versus Daoism") was definitely way too misleading. I've changed it to include it's about "Romanization". --Menchi 06:32, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
That does help, cheers.
Fire Star 15:38, 29 Feb 2004 (UTC)
Accuracy dispute
The initial sound of 道 clearly sounds much more like "d" than "t"; the only reason I'm not changing this myself is because I'm not an expert on phonology and don't want to alter the stuff about phonology myself.
Second, the statement that "This encyclopedia uses English spellings, such as Taoism and Tao Te Ching, in all articles, for consistency" is only accurate insofar as editors continue to follow this practice, and I'm not even sure they have been consistently applying this rule. Shouldn't this belong on Wikipedia:Manual of Style for China-related articles rather than here?
And it's a cop-out. Using Pinyin would be just as "consistent" if consistently used. The consistency is an empty one if the romanization is dying and Pinyin is the officially correct, ascendent one--both of which are true.
And by the way, Beijing is not Bei-zhing despite "Network News-speak" -- Jing is that very difficult syllable we find in Jingle bells, jingle bells . . . .
—Lowellian (talk)[[]] 07:47, Dec 7, 2004 (UTC)
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