[rant] please stop "spa cing pin yin like this"

people, please... chinese has words!! — by mati ★

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hey! this article isn't done yet.

you can read it if you want to, but it's probably going to have some little mistakes. also, it's going to be incomplete, because i... haven't finished it yet. if you want to read it though, that's okay, but i have other finished articles that are more interesting than this one on my main page, which is linked to in the arrow up there!

this rant is a sort of sequel to mandarin at the karaoke [pt].

you don't have to read mandarin at the karaoke to understand what i'm going to explain here, but it definitely helps, especially for the parts where i talk about 2+ syllable morphemes. there's going to be a few links to matk in this article, and you can click them if you want more detailed explanations of some things that i'm explaining here.

people inside and outside of the chinese-speaking world, please, stop spacing pinyin by syllables. it's almost as stupid as do ing it in en glish like this. i can kind of understand it when it comes from native chinese speakers, whose native language(s) don't have word spacing, but it's still bad. it's even worse though when it comes from L2 speakers, who are familiar with the notion of word spacing.

if you don't know what i'm talking about, let's take the mandarin word 自行车 'bicycle'. it's pronounced zìxíngchē, and just like english bicycle, it's a single word. but very often you'll see people spacing the romanization unnecessarily as zì xíng chē, which has the same vibes as writing "bi cy cle" (or "bi cycle", if you wanna split it by morphemes).

so, yeah, today i want to explain in detail why you shouldn't do this — why it doesn't make much linguistic sense, why it's even officially wrong, and maybe try to explain why people think this is a thing that you can or even should (!) do.


why people do this

there's basically two reasons why people space pinyin like that. it's more like one reason with two "sub-motivations", which are:

  1. the native writing system. people often think chinese is made of characters instead of being made of words, and if each character is one syllable, that means you have to space all the syllables.
  2. the morphology of chinese, which is the somewhat more justifiable version of this. most chinese morphemes are one syllable and are hence spelled with one character.

most multi-syllable mandarin words are easily analyzable compounds. for example, the word 课本 kèběn, which means 'textbook', is composed of 课 'lesson' and běn 'book'. the problem of thinking of this specific example as two words though is that běn never means 'book' as a standalone word! it can be used to count books, it's a measure word, as in yī běn shū, 'one book' (literally 'one [measure word] book'), but it doesn't mean the actual word 'book'. there's countless words like this in mandarin, where one or both parts of the 2-syllable compound can never be used alone. a mandarin-english dictionary called the "abc chinese dictionary" explains this really well right in its preface, when it talks about "bound forms":

abc chinese dictionary preface about bound forms — 1 of 2
abc chinese dictionary preface about bound forms — 2 of 2
→ for another explanation which i myself wrote about 2-syllable morphemes like xīshuài, see matk § cricket [pt]

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Pub: 05 Oct 2023 02:02 UTC
Edit: 30 Jan 2024 15:06 UTC
Views: 189