Tongyong (universal) pinyin, devised chiefly by Bo-cyuan Yu (Boquan Yu) in 1998, is a modified version of hanyu pinyin. Among the changes made in tongyong pinyin, the following two may be the most drastic: "q" in hanyu pinyin is replaced with "c" in tongyong pinyin and "x" in hanyu pinyin is replaced with "s" in tongyong pinyin. However, "c" in tongyong pinyin still maps to [c], and "s" in tongyong pinyin still maps to [s]. In other words, the two symbols "c" and "s" are ambiguous in tongyong pinyin, each maps to two Mandarin consonants. As a result, the ambiguity must be resolved by contextual information. When the stimulus-response mapping is not one to one, it is known as a situation called response conflict. Competition among incompatible responses results in increased reaction times and error rates, as is most evident in the Stroop task. The present study investigated the response conflict problem in tongyong pinyin. It was concluded that (1) the design of tongyong pinyin itself is flawed, and (2) tongyong pinyin and hanyu pinyin are not compatible. As a result, Taiwan should not adopt tongyong pinyin as its national standard.
Tongyong (universal) pinyin, devised chiefly by Bo-cyuan Yu (Boquan Yu) in 1998, is a modified version of hanyu pinyin. I assume you know hanyu pinyin, and have some background knowledge about the ongoing hanyu/tongyong debate in Taiwan. If not, please read my other web publication, Similarities Between Tongyong Pinyin and Hanyu Pinyin: Comparisons at the Syllable and Word Levels (Tsai, 2000a), for an introduction. You may also want to take a look at the Zhuyin, Hanyu Pinyin, and Tongyong Pinyin Cross-Reference Table (Tsai, 2000b).
Among the changes made in tongyong pinyin, the following two may be the most drastic: "q" in hanyu pinyin is replaced with "c" in tongyong pinyin and "x" in hanyu pinyin is replaced with "s" in tongyong pinyin. However, "c" in tongyong pinyin still maps to [c], and "s" in tongyong pinyin still maps to [s]. In other words, the two symbols "c" and "s" are ambiguous in tongyong pinyin, each maps to two Mandarin consonants. As a result, the ambiguity must be resolved by contextual information. For example, in tongyong pinyin, "c" is pronounced as [c] in "cih" and "cai," but as [q] in "ci" and "cia;" "s" is pronounced as [s] in "sih" and "sai," but as [x] in "si" and "sia." (Please note that in this article, a hanyu pinyin symbol enclosed by a pair of brackets represent the Mandarin consonant it represents.) When the stimulus-response mapping is not one to one, it is known as a situation called response conflict (Eriksen & Eriksen, 1974; Navon, 1977). Since the two responses for each of the ambiguous symbols "c" and "s" in tongyong pinyin are incompatible (that is, they cannot be both correct in any context), competition between the two responses occurs. Competition among incompatible responses results in increased reaction times and error rates, as is most evident in the Stroop task (Stroop, 1935).
The present study calculates the relative frequencies of the two alternative pronunciations for "c" and "s" in tongyong pinyin. Both type and token based frequencies will be calculated.
Syllables and Syllable Frequency Counts.The 416 basic Mandarin syllables (tones disregarded) defined in Wang (1998, p. 98) were adopted as the standard list for this study. The frequency count for each syllable was derived from Tsai (2000a).
Zhuyin, Hanyu Pinyin, and Tongyong Cross-Reference Table. The table was compiled by the author (Tsai, 2000b). Hanyu pinyin information were taken from DeFrancis's (1996) ABC Chinese-English Dictionary. Tongyong pinyin information were taken from Hsueh's (2000) Ziran Pinyin Dajia Tan (Let's Discuss About Natural Pinyin; in Chinese BIG5) website. Syllables spelled differently were encoded in the table. Since tongyong pinyin is quite young and still undergo continuous revision, it was not easy to find a "stable" version. I chose Hsueh's website as the information source for tongyong pinyin because her zhuyin-tongyong pinyin mapping table appeared to be quite recent. I cannot guarantee that my table is 100% accurate. If you should find an error, please let me know. (A month after the compilation of this mapping table, the Mandarin Commission of the Minister of Education finally made the final version of the draft for tongyong pinyin available on the web in mid-November, 2000. I have verified my table with this recently released draft, and everything appears to be up-to-date.)
Analyses were performed separately for "c" and "s." For each of the two ambiguous symbols, the type frequency (number of syllables types) and token frequency (number of syllable tokens) of each of its two pronunciations were calculated.
Table 1
Number of syllable types for each of the two pronunciations of the symbol "c" in tongyong pinyin (relative percentages are enclosed in parentheses)[c] [q] 16 (53.33%) 14 (46.67%)
Table 2
Number of syllable tokens for each of the two pronunciations of the symbol "c" in tongyong pinyin (relative percentages are enclosed in parentheses)[c] [q] 903,138 (24.99%) 2,711,341 (75.01%)
Table 3
Number of syllable types for each of the two pronunciations of the symbol "s" in tongyong pinyin (relative percentages are enclosed in parentheses)[s] [x] 17 (54.84%) 14 (45.16%)
Table 4
Number of syllable tokens for each of the two pronunciations of the symbol "s" in tongyong pinyin (relative percentages are enclosed in parentheses)[s] [x] 1,518,372 (19.39%) 6,313,579 (80.61%)
I will discuss the implications of the results in two scenarios. First, it is possible that some people only know tongyong pinyin but know nothing about hanyu pinyin. From the token-based statistics, it is obvious that for these people, the dominant response for "c" is [q], and the dominant response for "s" is [x]. When they encounter contexts where the subordinate responses (i.e., [c] and [s]) are demanded, the dominant responses will interfere with their responses. The consequence is that the response times will increase, and errors are likely to occur.
Second, it is also possible that some people already know hanyu pinyin before they learn tongyong pinyin. In fact, the size of this group of people should be much larger than the previous group, because hanyu pinyin is widely used. For these people, "c" is never pronounced as [q], and "s" is never pronounced as [x]. Without looking at the statistics, it is immediate obvious that they will have substantial difficulty when encountering contexts where those unusual responses are demanded. From the token-based statistics, it is obvious that 75.01% of the time, "c" demands a pronunciation other than [c], and 80.61% of the time, "s" demands a pronunciation other than [s]. This is certainly a disaster to them.
Without considering hanyu pinyin, tongyong pinyin itself has serious flaw in its design; namely, the response conflict problem. This effect of the response conflict problem expands when prior experience of hanyu pinyin is considered. It is concluded that (1) the design of tongyong pinyin itself is flawed, and (2) tongyong pinyin and hanyu pinyin are not compatible. As a result, Taiwan should not adopt tongyong pinyin as its national standard.
DeFrancis, J. (1996). ABC Chinese-English dictionary. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.
Eriksen, B. A., & Eriksen, C. W. (1974). Effects of noise letters upon the identification of a target letter in a non-search task. Perception & Psychophysics, 16, 143-149.
Hsueh, Y.-M. (2000). Ziran pinyin dajia tan [Discussing natural (tongyong) pinyin] [On-line]. Available http://www.chinesewaytogo.org/waytogo/expert/pinyin/pinying.htm
Navon, D. (1977). Forest before the trees: The precedence of global features in visual processing. Cognitive Psychology, 9, 353-383.
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 643-662.
Tsai, C.-H. (2000a). Similarities between tongyong pinyin and hanyu pinyin: Comparisons at the syllable and word levels [On-line]. Avaliable http://research.chtsai.org/papers/pinyin-comparison.html
Tsai, C.-H. (2000b). Zhuyin, hanyu pinyin, and tongyong pinyin cross-reference table [On-line]. Available http://research.chtsai.org/papers/pinyin-xref.html
Wang, H.-M. (1998). Statistical analysis of Mandarin acoustic units and automatic extraction of phonetically rich sentences based upon a very large Chinese text corpus. Computational Linguistics & Chinese Language Processing, 3, 93-114.