Notes on the Chinese found on this site

Wherever possible (and useful) the Chinese words for many of the terms and phrases on this site have been displayed. Some of these include: names, books, places, and various terminology. Some things should be noted about how the Chinese has been chosen and displayed.

Chinese Characters

Wherever possible I have included the Chinese characters for the above mentioned phrases/terms/names.

Due to the lack of a uniform standard in Chinese character codes (eg. Big 5 vs. EUC-TW, traditional vs. simplified, etc.) and the cost and effort that may be required for people to install Chinese viewing software, I have opted to use simple GIF images. Each image is roughly 26x26 pixels and contains 2 colours. Therefore I hope that the images are small enough (in filesize) as to allow fast download time for those with slower connections to the Internet.

Roman Orthography

It is of utmost importance to have a standard orthography when writing another language in your native alphabet. Without consistency things can get quite confusing. Unfortunately the damage has already been done in terms of writing Chinese using the Roman alphabet. In addition, Chinese is broken up into numerous dialects, the two most common being Cantonese and Mandarin.

Mandarin has traditionally been written using the Wade-Giles orthography. More recently, the Pinyin orthography is gaining popularity (especially on the Internet). I prefer Pinyin due to it's simplicity and popularity. However, Wade-Giles has already become the standard for writing many Chinese words and phrases including: T'ai Chi Ch'uan, I Ching, Tao, Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, etc.

Cantonese is traditionally a Colloquial language. That is, it is a "spoken" language. Also, the Chinese government has been pushing the use of Mandarin, especially in the educational system, thus making Cantonese seem like a secondary language. Despite this, Cantonese is becoming increasingly more popular and important. Thus, Cantonese standard orthographies are being brought forth, and a formal grammatical system is being put together. In the meantime, many Cantonese speakers are using their own personal (logical) orthographies, thus causing massive confusion as to how to spell and pronounce Cantonese words, written in the Roman alphabet. The most popular standard orthography (and my favourite) is the Yale orthography.

In the case of this web site, I have attempted to use both Cantonese and Mandarin pronounciation. Wherever possible I have used a (perhaps slightly modified) Yale and Pinyin orthography for Cantonese and Mandarin, respectively. However, for simplicity I have used the most common orthography for well-known terms and names, which is often Wade-Giles. Since I am not a fluent speaker of Chinese, my knowledge of the pronounciation of most Chinese words have come from dictionaries, books on Tai Chi/Taoism, and Chinese people I know (most of whom speak some version of Cantonese). I have attempted to use published sources as often as possible, hoping to avoid the possible confusion caused by using people's personal (usually inconsistent) orthographies. However, due to time constraints and errors, some spellings may not conform to any recognised standard. In this case, I would ask you to contact me at: info@kentstaichi.com

Some examples of the differences are shown below in the order of: Wade-Giles - Yale - Pinyin...
T'ai Chi Ch'uan - Taai Gik Kyun - Tai Ji Quan
Tao Te Ching - Dou Dak Ging - Dao De Jing
Lao Tzu - Lou Ji - Lao Zi
Chuang Tzu - Jong Ji - Zhuang Zi
Ch'i Kung - Hei Gung - Qi Gong
I Ching - Yi(k) Ging - Yi Jing

Sources and Documentation

Some invaluable sources for learning, using, and understanding Chinese and various Roman orthographies can be found on the resources page.

Home

Hosted by directNIC.com