Naming/pinyin

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"" < , juliej8@a... wrote:

<Speaking of conventions, does no one capitalize the pin yin words any more?><<I am not sure that was ever convention,at least not in actual asian studies.>>

 

Conventions for writing pinyin are:

-capitals used at beginning of sentences or in people's/countries names - which may consist of two or more characters, then only the first pinyin-form is capitalized). So: Wang Qingren etc.

-a combination of two or more characters that forms one noun (or other word), is written in pinyin without spaces. Names of medicinals are nouns and pinyin doesn't follow the german in this. So the convention is danggui, renshen, mudanpi etc. Classical Chinese is mostly a single-character language, that could be an argument to put spaces between the pinyin in the names of medicinals, like in the Bensky books and in Wiseman. Anyway, a modern chinese text, purely written in pinyin and putting spaces everywhere wouldn't be understandable enough any more, since you can't see which characters have to be combined.

Another convention in asian studies is, that pinyin is put between straight brackets like [danggui] etc. or also italized, like [danggui].

I personally don't care much about this convention in our field of study; it's difficult enough for a lot of people to learn the pinyin terms and spell them correctly. The capitalization some people use is probably to follow the convention for latin terms. Or editors use it to make clear it's a term and/or another language, thus avoiding the brackets. But well, why not italize then?

 

In names of medicinals and acupoints (and other medical terms), it's probably a good idea to put spaces between the pinyin. Especially because a lot of students don't take the time to study the basics of pinyin. (Alas, also for all the weird pronunciations). I'm fine with the way Bensky and Wiseman use pinyin, it has an argument as explained above. Nothing against danggui though...

 

<<I don't find lower case pinyin "unfriendly", but mushing the words together does seem incorrect as they are discrete characters. >>

In classical chinese, yes, modern, no, ... but if it provides more clarity: perfect. Still, formula names like banxia houpo tang or mahuang lianqiao chixiaodou tang might be clearer in the reading than ban xia hou po tang and ma huang lian qiao chi xiao dou tang for people starting to learn all this...and don't know all the pinyin names of the medicinals.

 

<<Nevertheless, unschuld often hyphenates herb names >>

 

that's according to convention using Wade-Giles. In his latest publication (huray!) Unschuld also changes to pinyin (italized, non-capitalized & without spaces in nouns).

 

greetings to all

Herman