Cyrillic Romanisation: Use BGN/PCGN system for Russian/Cyrillic. Е and е should be romanised as ye if it stands alone or after a, e, ё, и, о, у, ы, э, ю, я, й, ъ, ь. In other cases, it should be romanised as e. ё should be romanised to ye, however, use yo or o to avoid usage of special characters. Ignore any other rules in the file provided, these are either irrelevant or wouldn't help in the game. If an artist uses a preferred romanisation, follow it regardless of this rule. For most of the other characters, refer to the first page of this document.

Russian Romanisation: Use BGN/PCGN system for Russian. Е and е should be romanised as ye if it stands alone or after a, e, ё, и, о, у, ы, э, ю, я, й, ъ, ь. In other cases, it should be romanised as e. ё should be romanised to ye, however, use yo or o to avoid usage of special characters. Ignore any other rules in the file provided, these are either irrelevant or wouldn't help in the game. If an artist uses a preferred romanisation, follow it regardless of this rule. For most of the other characters, refer to the first page of this document.

Shiguma wrote:

I believe that TV size cuts of songs should have the (TV Size) label on them, regardless of the official source. My reasoning for this is, when you search up a song, having the (TV Size) in the metadata won't affect searching for that song, while also making it very clear that whichever set you are looking at is the short version of a song. If we're bringing common sense into metadata, I don't see why we shouldn't do this.

Pachiru wrote:

"Guest mappers and storyboarders must be added to the tags of a beatmap set." People who makes the hitsounds shouldn't be added to the tags aswell or it's not mendatory?

Nevo wrote:

Pachiru wrote:

"Guest mappers and storyboarders must be added to the tags of a beatmap set." People who makes the hitsounds shouldn't be added to the tags aswell or it's not mendatory?

I definitely feel people who make hitsounds for a set should be required in tags, since they do play a large role in mapsets, also because a lot of hitsounders put forth plenty of time and effort into their work.

Nevo wrote:

Pachiru wrote:

"Guest mappers and storyboarders must be added to the tags of a beatmap set." People who makes the hitsounds shouldn't be added to the tags aswell or it's not mendatory?

I definitely feel people who make hitsounds for a set should be required in tags, since they do play a large role in mapsets, also because a lot of hitsounders put forth plenty of time and effort into their work.

If a track has more than 5 artists they must be substituted with Various Artists, similarly if a track is composed of 3 or more individual tracks, the title must be substituded to <Descriptor> Compilation.

Songs with German umlauts (ü, ö, ä and ß) must be romanised into two-letter combination (ue, oe, ae and ss).

Commas, vs., &, feat./ft., CV: must always use a trailing whitespace. Unless it is a comma, leading whitespace is also required.

If a song or artist are referred to in multiple ways on official sources provided by the artist, the mapper is free to choose any of the romanisations. The only exception to this is if the song already has a mapset in the Ranked Section, in which case the corresponding guideline applies to it.

Only use the Source field if the song comes from, is remixed from or specifically fan-made for a video game, movie, or series. Website names are not an acceptable Artist nor Source.

Guest mappers and storyboarders must be added to the tags of a beatmap set. This is to give credit where credit is due and helping others identify the main contributers of any given beatmap set.

For songs belonging to doujin circles, the circle name must be used over the vocalist or composer, unless these contributors are not part of the circle. In these cases the priority falls on vocalist followed by composer for instrumental songs.

Special unicode characters must be filtered to their nearest standard equivalent or removed from the Romanised Artist and Romanised Title fields within a .osu file. ★ ☆ ⚝ ✩ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ 🟉 🟊 ✮ ✯ ✰ and the likes are substituded to an asterisk. Corner Brackets have to be written as quotation marks instead. Other special characters are to be romanised or dropped on case-by-case basis.

ailv wrote:

Only use the Source field if the song comes from, is remixed from or specifically fan-made for a video game, movie, or series. Website names are not an acceptable Artist nor Source.

Does this include if the song was popularized by a specific game/movie/series? I beleive that's how it's being handled rn as well.

Naotoshi wrote:

agre w/ nevo abt hitsounders in tags.

i think forcing tv size is a bit stupid since "cut ver." for example isn't forced if it's not official yet it serves the exact same purpose. it takes players about 3 seconds to see if a map is tv size or not, and in many cases dropping it makes the title look much cleaner anyway.

Sieg wrote:

alright

Cyrillic Romanisation: Use BGN/PCGN system for Russian/Cyrillic. Е and е should be romanised as ye if it stands alone or after a, e, ё, и, о, у, ы, э, ю, я, й, ъ, ь. In other cases, it should be romanised as e. ё should be romanised to ye, however, use yo or o to avoid usage of special characters. Ignore any other rules in the file provided, these are either irrelevant or wouldn't help in the game. If an artist uses a preferred romanisation, follow it regardless of this rule. For most of the other characters, refer to the first page of this document.

I suggest to remove "Cyrillic" and leave it to case by case since current wording is ambiguous trying to cover all Cyrillic languages with different phonetics and different scenarios of romanisation, which is obviously wrong approach. So, reword it to

Russian Romanisation: Use BGN/PCGN system for Russian. Е and е should be romanised as ye if it stands alone or after a, e, ё, и, о, у, ы, э, ю, я, й, ъ, ь. In other cases, it should be romanised as e. ё should be romanised to ye, however, use yo or o to avoid usage of special characters. Ignore any other rules in the file provided, these are either irrelevant or wouldn't help in the game. If an artist uses a preferred romanisation, follow it regardless of this rule. For most of the other characters, refer to the first page of this document.

J1NX1337 wrote:

Brackets within artist or title fields should be separated from the other text surrounding it, unless there is obvious reason to not do so.

-> unless there is an obvious reason not to do so.
Slight grammar correction.

Kurai wrote:

- Cyrillic Romanisation should follow the BGN/PCGN system (except for the letter ё in Russian which should follow the GOST 2002(B) system). Read more here: http://up.kuraip.net/032209ex3724.pdf

Pachiru wrote:

For tags, from draft: "This is to give credit where credit is due and helping others identify the main contributers of any given beatmap set."

Since we should give feedback to the main contributors of the set, we need to put the person who made the hitsounding, which is an important part of the map, because without hitsounds the map is unrankable. If we give credit to someone who made something optional like Storyboard, we should add the hitsounds person to the tag aswell.

(also, don't forget to fix the typo on: "contributers" → "contributors")

ailv wrote:

If a track has more than 5 artists they must be substituted with Various Artists, similarly if a track is composed of 3 or more individual tracks, the title must be substituded to <Descriptor> Compilation.

What about albums? E.g If I were to map https://soundcloud.com/owslaofficial/se ... nctuary-ep the entirety of this ep mixed into one track, I can't see why I'd have to name it "Sanctuary EP Compilation" over just "Sanctuary EP".
suggest an alternative, this is a fair point

Songs with German umlauts (ü, ö, ä and ß) must be romanised into two-letter combination (ue, oe, ae and ss).

This doesn't make sense in certain cases, for example https://osu.ppy.sh/s/723626 wouldn't make sense as the "Ü" is simply a stylizing choice, it's intended to be a U with some fancy shmancy stuff.
limiting it to romanisation of german then because german words are affected

Commas, vs., &, feat./ft., CV: must always use a trailing whitespace. Unless it is a comma, leading whitespace is also required.

does this include "ft" or "feat" without a "."
now it does

If a song or artist are referred to in multiple ways on official sources provided by the artist, the mapper is free to choose any of the romanisations. The only exception to this is if the song already has a mapset in the Ranked Section, in which case the corresponding guideline applies to it.

How does this apply to https://osu.ppy.sh/p/beatmaplist?q=diao%20ye%20zong which has had maps ranked under "Diao Ye Zong" and "RD-Sounds".
if the song youre mapping has 2 ranked sets with both then you can go back to choosing, otherwise follow ranked unless that one was wrong

Only use the Source field if the song comes from, is remixed from or specifically fan-made for a video game, movie, or series. Website names are not an acceptable Artist nor Source.

Does this include if the song was popularized by a specific game/movie/series? I beleive that's how it's being handled rn as well.
example needed?

Guest mappers and storyboarders must be added to the tags of a beatmap set. This is to give credit where credit is due and helping others identify the main contributers of any given beatmap set.

Does this need to be extended to previous usernames?
does it say so? no.

For songs belonging to doujin circles, the circle name must be used over the vocalist or composer, unless these contributors are not part of the circle. In these cases the priority falls on vocalist followed by composer for instrumental songs.

I'm not sure if I'm interpreting this wrong, but shouldn't it be more something like guest composer + circle, to give accurate credit in those cases?
usually when that happens the song is a guest on an album anyways but im not sure myself more debate required.

Special unicode characters must be filtered to their nearest standard equivalent or removed from the Romanised Artist and Romanised Title fields within a .osu file. ★ ☆ ⚝ ✩ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ 🟉 🟊 ✮ ✯ ✰ and the likes are substituded to an asterisk. Corner Brackets have to be written as quotation marks instead. Other special characters are to be romanised or dropped on case-by-case basis.

I believe there should be some clarification between ' ' and " ", being used for romanization of 「 」, see https://osu.ppy.sh/s/735097, https://osu.ppy.sh/s/538136. Since British and American ways differ.
then clarify instead of saying that?

The same applies to the Source field if a romanised Source is preferred by the mapper.

ailv wrote:

If a track has more than 5 artists they must be substituted with Various Artists, similarly if a track is composed of 3 or more individual tracks, the title must be substituded to <Descriptor> Compilation.

What about albums? E.g If I were to map https://soundcloud.com/owslaofficial/se ... nctuary-ep the entirety of this ep mixed into one track, I can't see why I'd have to name it "Sanctuary EP Compilation" over just "Sanctuary EP".
suggest an alternative, this is a fair point

Compilation should be used in cases where the songs are not already part of a organized set of songs.

Songs with German umlauts (ü, ö, ä and ß) must be romanised into two-letter combination (ue, oe, ae and ss).

This doesn't make sense in certain cases, for example https://osu.ppy.sh/s/723626 wouldn't make sense as the "Ü" is simply a stylizing choice, it's intended to be a U with some fancy shmancy stuff.
limiting it to romanisation of german then because german words are affected

Can we state that this appleis speficially to Songs with a German title or artist fields then? Currently the wording implies that any song with those german umlaut characters would need to be romanized as such.

Guest mappers and storyboarders must be added to the tags of a beatmap set. This is to give credit where credit is due and helping others identify the main contributers of any given beatmap set.

Does this need to be extended to previous usernames?
does it say so? no.

I've seen discussion about this before, I think I've seen cases where the previous username was added to the online tags so a DQ wouldn't be needed. I think further discussion would be useful.

Special unicode characters must be filtered to their nearest standard equivalent or removed from the Romanised Artist and Romanised Title fields within a .osu file. ★ ☆ ⚝ ✩ ✪ ✫ ✬ ✭ 🟉 🟊 ✮ ✯ ✰ and the likes are substituded to an asterisk. Corner Brackets have to be written as quotation marks instead. Other special characters are to be romanised or dropped on case-by-case basis.

I believe there should be some clarification between ' ' and " ", being used for romanization of 「 」, see https://osu.ppy.sh/s/735097, https://osu.ppy.sh/s/538136. Since British and American ways differ.
then clarify instead of saying that? I don't know which one is better, i'd propose that bot are acceptable and up to choice.

the thing part nine wrote:

Word-by-word Romanisation: Each character must be romanised into a single, capitalised, separated word. Refer to this thread for examples and supplementary information.

the thing part thirty wrote:

Guest mappers, storyboarders, and hitsounders must be added to the tags of a beatmap set. This is to give credit where credit is due and helping others identify the main contributors of any given beatmap set.

the thing part forty two wrote:

Commas, vs., &, any variations of feat./ft., CV: must always use a trailing whitespace. Unless it is a comma, leading whitespace is also required.

Okoratu wrote:

4 yea idk either

If the creator of the mapset has done major edits to the .mp3, they are free to name it appropriately to signal that this song is a special version. In this case the original songs must still be clearly indicated in order for players to be able to search for the original songs.

Corner Brackets have to be written as quotation marks instead.

Other special characters are to be romanised or dropped on case-by-case basis.

Brackets within artist or title fields should be separated from the other text surrounding it, unless there is obvious reason not to do so. Reasoning like this would include syntactical use of brackets and the general typesetting of a song title or artist using them without whitespaces often and consistently across multiple platforms.

ailv wrote:

Corner Brackets have to be written as quotation marks instead.

Add an example of what a corner bracket is "⸤ ⸥" and " ｢ ｣ " since there are multiple forms.

Noffy wrote:

That's why it's in the glossary

Okoratu wrote:

also the source is a unicode field as such it can hold anything we want it to -> the mapper should have the choice to decide which one is shown in the client

Okoratu wrote:

Kurai wrote:

- Cyrillic Romanisation should follow the BGN/PCGN system (except for the letter ё in Russian which should follow the GOST 2002(B) system). Read more here: http://up.kuraip.net/032209ex3724.pdf

can some russians say something about http://up.kuraip.net/032209ex3724.pdf ? it seems to make sense and encompass all things said

pdf wrote:

Hopefully, the BGN/PCGN systems have been built so that Cyrillic can be rendered by using only the basic letters and punctuation found on English language keyboards.

CrystilonZ wrote:

just as third party stuff arent accepted as refs imo crunchyroll shouldn't be accepted as well i guess

for cases like games that are released in a lot of regions english names should be okay
ea. both ポケモン超不思議のダンジョン and Pokémon Super Mystery Dungeon are fine

Crunchyroll wrote:

officially-licensed content from leading Asian media producers directly to viewers translated professionally in multiple languages

Proposed Rules wrote:

1. Languages in Chinese language family must be Romanised accordingly. Do not Romanise Cantonese texts with Hanyu Pinyin method of Romanisation.
2. Songs with Mandarin titles and/or Mandarin artists must use the Hanyu Pinyin method of Romanisation when there is no Romanisation or translation information listed by an official source. The ü vowel should be Romanised into u and all diacritical tone marks should be omitted because of the technical limitations resulting from the limited amount of characters allowed in the Romanised title/artist fields.
3. For capitalisation and word separation, refer to The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography (汉语拼音正词法基本规则/漢語拼音正詞法基本規則). In short, generally every word should be separated and capitalised. Surname and first name are separated using a space and are capitalised.
4. Particles (助词) are written separately and should not be capitalised.

Proposed Rules wrote:

1. Songs with Mandarin titles and/or Mandarin artists must use the Hanyu Pinyin method of Romanisation when there is no Romanisation or translation information listed by an official source. The ü vowel should be Romanised into u and all diacritical tone marks should be omitted because of the technical limitations resulting from the limited amount of characters allowed in the Romanised title/artist fields. There is a vowel that is "u", using "u" for "ü" just mess up them, currently there are not better choice other than "v". And only at very a few cases, it may use 'yu' for people name, and it's arguable, but I am not able to consider this is suitable to represent all the "ü"

Wafu wrote:

1. Current system
   
   1. Titles are easy read ✘ (most of people will read every syllable as if it was one word)
   2. Titles are easy to remember ✘ (words are easier to remember than separate syllables, humans remember the words easier by their shape)
   3. Fits the rules of Latin script (Romanisation = writing words from other script to Latin/Roman script) ✘ (Latin script is alphabetical, therefore separating each syllable doesn't make sense and doesn't read well for majority of Latin script)
   4. Fits the rules of Chinese script ✘ (Impossible, if you want to make it "fit" to the Chinese script, you would have to replace each character with one logogram, Latin alphabet doesn't have logograms. Chinese is also not syllabary script, so separating each syllable again doesn't make sense.)
   5. Differentiates between different Romanisations and meanings of the same sequences of characters. ✘
   6. Includes tones in Romanised text ✘ (Impossible with characters which we are limited to. You could use "a1", "a2" (redundant) etc., but that would make the text incomprehensible, majority of people wouldn't even know how to pronounce it)
   7. Doesn't replace characters with others which have no evidence of being similar to the intended character. ✘ (ü is replaced with v, which doesn't seem to be supported by any logical argument)
   8. You can use a different Romanisation system for dialects where the current system wouldn't work at all ✘
   9. Isn't related to politics ✘ (Impossible, picking any Romanisation system is picking a side, every Romanisation system is related to politics)
2. Proposal
   
   1. Titles are easy read ✔ sorry but as a Chinese speaker I don't think they are not easier to read than current seperated romanisation format
   2. Titles are easy to remember ✔ They are not easier to remember than current seperated romanisation from a Chinese speaker side as well
   3. Fits the rules of Latin script (Romanisation = writing words from other script to Latin/Roman script) ✔Latin script isn't fittable to Chinese, Pinyin system is much better from my side too
   4. Fits the rules of Chinese script ✘ (Impossible, if you want to make it "fit" to the Chinese script, you would have to replace each character with one logogram, Latin alphabet doesn't have logograms.)
   5. Differentiates between different Romanisations and meanings of the same sequences of characters. ✔explained above, for Chinese characters, Pinyin or any other romanisation system doesn't have any meaning at all, it's just a way to use as mark for Mandarin
   6. Includes tones in Romanised text ✘ (Impossible with characters which we are limited to. You could use "a1", "a2" (redundant) etc., but that would make the text incomprehensible, majority of people wouldn't even know how to pronounce it)
   7. Doesn't replace characters with others based on no evidence that they are similar to the intended character. ✔ as the pinyin or anyother romanisation/latin letters (they are just used as mark as I said)doesn't stand for meaning, this feels unnecessary
   8. You can use a different Romanisation system for dialects where the current system wouldn't work at all ✔ Dialects don't have an official way of writing formally, even in HK, schools teach the Mandarin grammar and write standard Chinese grammar while only use cantonese as a pronuciation. There wouldn't be songs that use dialects as song titile and artist, so they don't need to be romanised at any case.
   9. Isn't related to politics ✘ (Impossible, picking any Romanisation system is picking a side, every Romanisation system is related to politics)

Fycho wrote:

Below are that I disagree: (blue are my replies)

Wafu wrote:

Proposal

1. Titles are easy read ✔ sorry but as a Chinese speaker I don't think they are not easier to read than current seperated romanisation form As stated above they are easier for the majority of the player base and they are not harder to read for the Chinese. That means no cons just pros.
2. Titles are easy to remember ✔ They are not easier to remember than current seperated romanisation from a Chinese Speaker side as well
3. Fits the rules of Latin script (Romanisation = writing words from other script to Latin/Roman script) ✔Latin script isn't fittable to Chinese, Pinyin system is much better from my side too
4. Fits the rules of Chinese script ✘ (Impossible, if you want to make it "fit" to the Chinese script, you would have to replace each character with one logogram, Latin alphabet doesn't have logograms.)
5. Differentiates between different Romanisations and meanings of the same sequences of characters. ✔explained above, for Chinese characters, Pinyin or any other romanisation system doesn't have any meaning at all, it's just a way to use as mark for Mandarin I think the point here is about homophones and stuff. Same sequence of pronunciation might produce two (or more) different meanings. Separating Romanised titles into words should help with the comprehensibility.
6. Includes tones in Romanised text ✘ (Impossible with characters which we are limited to. You could use "a1", "a2" (redundant) etc., but that would make the text incomprehensible, majority of people wouldn't even know how to pronounce it)
7. Doesn't replace characters with others based on no evidence that they are similar to the intended character. ✔ as the pinyin or anyother romanisation/latin letters (they are just used as mark as I said)doesn't stand for meaning, this feels unnecessary speaking about u and v here. v is just impossible to pronounce. I'm always open for a better alternative.
8. You can use a different Romanisation system for dialects where the current system wouldn't work at all ✔ This is only about Mandarin, dialects are not included. (Cantonese, Wu-Chinese(Shanghainese, Suzhou Hua, Wuxi , HangZhou), Jiang–Huai Mandarin, Southern Fujian Dialect, Hakka Dialect, etc don't need to be discussed for now this is speaking about the new rule. Languages in Chinese language family must be Romanised accordingly. This opens room for other Chinese languages to use suitable Romanisation systems, not restricting all Chinese languages to one bad system which may or may not fit the language.
9. Isn't related to politics ✘ (Impossible, picking any Romanisation system is picking a side, every Romanisation system is related to politics)

CrystilonZ wrote:

I think the point here is about homophones and stuff. Same sequence of pronunciation might produce two (or more) different meanings. Separating Romanised titles into words should help with the comprehensibility.

CrystilonZ wrote:

Other languages that use the Chinese script are irrelevant to this proposal.
We are only talking about Standard Mandarin here and Mandarin is not equivalent to Chinese.
We only use 'Chinese' in the draft for simplicity. The wording will be changed if this is implemented.

1. is this a Mandarin Chinese song?
   - maybe from official settings or sites, not a big deal. but will not do if you map some cult song.
2. how to get the right romanized characters?
   - ask some Chinese staff/mapper/player? i doult any of them have time/ability to do it.
3. how to make sure those things i got is correct?
   - some kind of same as the one above, if that person exsist and can do his job endlessly, he will be really welcomed to this system.

Proposed Rules wrote:

The ü vowel should be Romanised into u and all diacritical tone marks should be omitted because of the technical limitations resulting from the limited amount of characters allowed in the Romanised title/artist fields.

CrystilonZ wrote:

speaking about u and v here. v is just impossible to pronounce. I'm always open for a better alternative.

Previous Discussion wrote:

1. Current system
   
   1. Titles are easy read ✘ (most of people will read every syllable as if it was one word)
   2. Titles are easy to remember ✘ (words are easier to remember than separate syllables, humans remember the words easier by their shape)
2. Proposal
   
   1. Titles are easy read ✔
   2. Titles are easy to remember ✔

Previous Discussion wrote:

For my thoughts on the matter I don't understand how romanising 学不会 to Xue Bu Hui is more informative than Xue Buhui or Xuebuhui. Word separation can be ambiguous at times but whether you write Xue Buhui or Xuebuhui it's more informative than the Xue Bu Hui according to the current RC.

Previous Discussion wrote:

1. Fits the rules of Chinese script ✘ (Impossible, if you want to make it "fit" to the Chinese script, you would have to replace each character with one logogram, Latin alphabet doesn't have logograms.)
2. Differentiates between different Romanisations and meanings of the same sequences of characters. ✔
3. Doesn't replace characters with others based on no evidence that they are similar to the intended character. ✔

1. Proposal
   
   1. Titles are easy read ✘
   2. Titles are easy to remember ✘
   3. Fits the rules of Chinese script ✘
   4. Differentiates between different Romanisations and meanings of the same sequences of characters. ✘
   5. Includes tones in Romanised text ✘
   6. Doesn't replace characters with others based on no evidence that they are similar to the intended character. ✘
   7. Isn't related to politics ✘
   8. Easy for non-Mandarin speakers/players to search in the beatmap list. ✘
   9. Avoid mislead players about the meaning of title. ✘
   10. Provide a practical or feasible method of romanization. ✘

Hollow Wings wrote:

1. In automatic romanizing working progress, there're two ways for Chinese Romanisation:
a. semi-automatic romanisation from Chinese words separated by following proper rules.
b. automatic romanisation from Chinese characters one by one.
2. During this period of time, most of other countries aside of PRC can't fully accept that romanizing Chinese characters into separated words according to combinations between Chinese characters, because the works of finding and dealing with the concept of Chinese words are complex, also the grammar of Chinese sentence can even blur it.
after thousand of thoughts, they decide to do the romanization work from Chinese characters one by one.

Hollow Wings wrote:

1. Egyptian hieroglyphs (eg. Ancient Egyptian) ←already dead
2. Cuneiform script (eg. Ancient Sumerian) ←already dead
3. Seal hieroglyphs (eg. Ancient Indian) ←already dead
4. Maya hieroglyphs (eg. Ancient Mayan) ←already dead
5. Chinese characters (eg. Chinese)

and NO MORE.
if you want to know why language system is like that, then that's a long story, i wont start telling them here.
the reason i pick up those truth above, is because i want you guys know the chinese language's specificity and leading to how different romanisation is done between alphabetic language and ideographic language.

Hollow Wings wrote:

however, this is not reversible.

abraker wrote:

Any thoughts about mapping style or patterns the maps have being in tags?

1. If we romanise Chinese title in word-by-word way(each character must be romanised into a single, capitalised, separated word) or generally every word should be separated and capitalised according to The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography.
2. If using "yu" or "u" for the romanisation of the vowel "ü".
3. If we need to distinguish dialects from Mandarin in romanisation.

CrystilonZ wrote:

For point 1. I just don't see how this is related to our discussion. " In automatic romanizing working progress"

CrystilonZ wrote:

2. Can you quote the exact words from the document? also all the reasons as stated in the standard as well. I couldn't read it while working on the proposal because 115 swiss franc is hella expensive.

CrystilonZ wrote:

Read more about ideograms here. These are logograms. Modern Chinese characters are logographic.

A number of lines after this are about pinyin being a method of transcription. No comments there this is acknowledged since the beginning that this is just the way to pronounce stuff. And the next few lines are about Mandarin having a lot of homophones.

CrystilonZ wrote:

Hollow Wings wrote:

however, this is not reversible.

This is not exactly true. If it were Mandarin would have been dead a long while ago because the only way to communicate would be carrying a crap ton of paper with you at all time and write stuff when you want to communicate.
In English context it would be equivalent to you guys seeing or hearing /tīm/ (IPA stuff. This reads time). Intuitively the first thing that come into your heads would be the time. Tick-tock clocky stuff. However under different contexts:
"Can you buy me some /tīm/. I'm going to use it to cook dinner." In this case /tīm/ is the herb thyme.
"I don't have enough /tīm/ to do my homework. It's due tomorrow." In this case it's "time"
"Two /tīm/ two equal four." In this context it means multiply. 10/10 grammar.
As you can see they are reversible with context. And when you guys speak to each other you're actively tracing back to the original Hanzi characters using their pronunciation. Therefore, saying that it is not reversible is not true. It's harder in Mandarin (410 syllables - crap tons of words. Do the maths) but the fact that there are people speaking Mandarin proves the fact that it's possible.

conservative = a person who favors maintenance of the status quo

Fycho wrote:

Below are that I disagree: (blue are my replies)

Wafu wrote:

1. Current system
   
   1. Titles are easy read ✘ (most of people will read every syllable as if it was one word)
   2. Titles are easy to remember ✘ (words are easier to remember than separate syllables, humans remember the words easier by their shape)
   3. Fits the rules of Latin script (Romanisation = writing words from other script to Latin/Roman script) ✘ (Latin script is alphabetical, therefore separating each syllable doesn't make sense and doesn't read well for majority of Latin script)
   4. Fits the rules of Chinese script ✘ (Impossible, if you want to make it "fit" to the Chinese script, you would have to replace each character with one logogram, Latin alphabet doesn't have logograms. Chinese is also not syllabary script, so separating each syllable again doesn't make sense.)
   5. Differentiates between different Romanisations and meanings of the same sequences of characters. ✘
   6. Includes tones in Romanised text ✘ (Impossible with characters which we are limited to. You could use "a1", "a2" (redundant) etc., but that would make the text incomprehensible, majority of people wouldn't even know how to pronounce it)
   7. Doesn't replace characters with others which have no evidence of being similar to the intended character. ✘ (ü is replaced with v, which doesn't seem to be supported by any logical argument)
   8. You can use a different Romanisation system for dialects where the current system wouldn't work at all ✘
   9. Isn't related to politics ✘ (Impossible, picking any Romanisation system is picking a side, every Romanisation system is related to politics)
2. Proposal
   
   1. Titles are easy read ✔ sorry but as a Chinese speaker I don't think they are not easier to read than current seperated romanisation format
   2. Titles are easy to remember ✔ They are not easier to remember than current seperated romanisation from a Chinese speaker side as well
   3. Fits the rules of Latin script (Romanisation = writing words from other script to Latin/Roman script) ✔Lantin script isn't fittable to Chinese, Pinyin system is much better from my side too
   4. Fits the rules of Chinese script ✘ (Impossible, if you want to make it "fit" to the Chinese script, you would have to replace each character with one logogram, Latin alphabet doesn't have logograms.)
   5. Differentiates between different Romanisations and meanings of the same sequences of characters. ✔explained above, for Chinese characters, Pinyin or any other romanisation system doesn't have any meaning at all, it's just a way to use as mark for Mandarin
   6. Includes tones in Romanised text ✘ (Impossible with characters which we are limited to. You could use "a1", "a2" (redundant) etc., but that would make the text incomprehensible, majority of people wouldn't even know how to pronounce it)
   7. Doesn't replace characters with others based on no evidence that they are similar to the intended character. ✔ as the pinyin or anyother romanisation/lantin letters (they are just used as mark as I said)doesn't stand for meaning, this feels unnecessary
   8. You can use a different Romanisation system for dialects where the current system wouldn't work at all ✔ Dialects don't have an official way of writing formally, even in HK, schools teach the Mandarin grammar and write standard Chinese grammar while only use cantonese as a pronuciation. There wouldn't be songs that use dialects as song titile and artist, so they don't need to be romanised at any case.
   9. Isn't related to politics ✘ (Impossible, picking any Romanisation system is picking a side, every Romanisation system is related to politics)

tl;nr: Current romanisation of Chinese is a fair enough way, I don't think it needs to be revised.

1. 1. As for the readability point, you should probably know that Romanisation is not designed for Chinese people. It's not designed for people who use that language daily. You, I assume, are fluent in Chinese. That means you know how to read this language and your ability to read it either way is in no way impaired. Romanisation is for people who use Latin script as their primary writing script. Because such languages separate words (not syllables), these people are used to reading them, so reading something what appears to resemble a whole word is much easier for them to comprehend and read. If you want, we can hook up some people who have no knowledge of Chinese (and use Latin script), ask one group to read some song titles in the current system, and the other group, to read it with the other system. Obviously, both groups will pronounce it poorly, but the latter one will be slightly less robotic (I assume Chinese people don't like to hear the "ching chong" epithet. This is one of the reason it exists, I don't understand how you actually don't see it), they will actually read it more continuously, rather than with a gap between each syllable.
2. 2. As for the memory point, again, you are considering this point from the Chinese speaker perspective. That's not the target group. As above, it's about how Latin script works with words. As you probably know, when people who use Latin script read longer words, they generally don't read them, they just recognize it by the shape of the word. Because of that, they will also miss minor spelling errors, because they read the originally intended word by the shape. That suggests (which is a fact by the way) that they memorize text (that is seemingly a word) much easier than syllables. As an example, you probably have the shape of "Romanisation" memorized pretty well. That means if I'd misspell it to "Ronamisation", you would quite likely not notice that. Whereas if I did "Ro Na Mi Sa Ti On", you would more likely notice the error, because you would read it syllable by syllable. You can look up information about this pretty easily. Again, this can be easily proven the same way as 1. We could just find some people for a memory test, one group given the syllable version, the other one the seemingly "words".
3. 3. Non-sense. I think, if you are interested in Romanisation, you should know that it's not "Lantin", it's "Latin". Could make some assumption, but I won't accuse anyone of not doing research as some of you have. The point below exactly explains that it's impossible to fit to Chinese script, no Romanisation/transcription/transliteration system can do it. If you think we shouldn't be using Latin, you may have problem with current Romanisation system. (It's fully based on Latin script, no other script is allowed in the Romanised title/artist field)
4. 4. That's not at all what I'm talking about. And you are plain making stuff up.
5. 5. How does this make sense? The Romanisation systems we are currently using in the proposal all have very similar reading, in fact as similar to each other as possible. We care about the way people will read that. What you are saying here is that "it doesn't matter if some characters are represented with wrong character". You are literally saying that it wouldn't matter if we romanise 大 as "Da" or as "Wx". The ü character was suggested as "u", because it sorta sounds like a "swallowed" hard "u", tiny bit similar to German. That's why it made sense (whether that is the best option is up to discussion, but not up to denial for a reason that is "most keyboard layouts have v here", there's no linguistic basis behind v, that makes the current system completely invalid)
6. 6. There's enough major evidence that the current system doesn't work. This is only a conservative stance that you guys have, so that no change happens, because that's the way you are used to it. You should be open to the fact that old things are not always the best and some things just have to be replaced at some point.

Hollow Wings wrote:

OK, what a mess.

just wanna warning: my post will be long.
check it as detail as you can to know about Chinese language and its romanisation, if you wanna get involved into this.

A. Important things about Chinese Romanisation

I. "ISO 7098:2015".
1st thing of all, know things about ISO 7098:2015 as much as you can.

ISO 7098:2015 explains the principles of the Romanization of Modern Chinese Putonghua (Mandarin Chinese), the official language of the People's Republic of China as defined in the Directives for the Promotion of Putonghua, promulgated on 1956-02-06 by the State Council of China. This International Standard can be applied in documentation of bibliographies, catalogues, indices, toponymic lists, etc.

all contents in this document are important, you may know some before. and there's two parts i wanna specially mention for you, they are like:
1. In automatic romanizing working progress, there're two ways for Chinese Romanisation:
a. semi-automatic romanisation from Chinese words separated by following proper rules.
b. automatic romanisation from Chinese characters one by one.
2. During this period of time, most of other countries aside of PRC can't fully accept that romanizing Chinese characters into separated words according to combinations between Chinese characters, because the works of finding and dealing with the concept of Chinese words are complex, also the grammar of Chinese sentence can even blur it.
after thousand of thoughts, they decide to do the romanization work from Chinese characters one by one.

↑ this is my opening, just mark it and go on.


II. How special Chinese is as a kind of language.

according to the way characters comprise words, languages can be divided into alphabetic language and ideographic language, with alphabet and ideogram as their own characters.

a. alphabetic language is simple, most of you can easily know its concept. also, most of languages exist now, are alphabetic language. they are comprised with proper alphabet of their own. as i known:

1. Cyrillic alphabet (eg. Russian)
2. Hebrew characters (eg. Hebrew)
3. Arabic alphabet (eg. Arabic)
4. Armenian character (eg. Armenian)
5. Georgian character (eg. Georgian)
6. Old Geez abjad (eg. Old Geez) ←already dead
7. Devanagari script (eg. Sanskrit)
8. Tamil alphabet (eg. Tamil)
9. Kana script (eg. Japanese)
10. Hangul script (eg. Korean)
11. Thai script (eg. Thai)
12. Tibetan script (eg. Tibetan)
13. Mongolian script (eg. Mongolian)

... and tons of other alphabetic languages which may not be widely used or just dead.

b. ideographic language is like, every single character was born from some exact thing or matter, this is very different from alphabetic language.
however, as i known, language that is ideographic language are:

1. Egyptian hieroglyphs (eg. Ancient Egyptian) ←already dead
2. Cuneiform script (eg. Ancient Sumerian) ←already dead
3. Seal hieroglyphs (eg. Ancient Indian) ←already dead
4. Maya hieroglyphs (eg. Ancient Mayan) ←already dead
5. Chinese characters (eg. Chinese)

and NO MORE.

if you want to know why language system is like that, then that's a long story, i wont start telling them here.
the reason i pick up those truth above, is because i want you guys know the chinese language's specificity and leading to how different romanisation is done between alphabetic language and ideographic language.


III. “Transliteration” and “Transcription”
(Wafu: I have to shorten this because of character limit.)

B. Relation to osu community nomination system

CrystilonZ wrote:

Other languages that use the Chinese script are irrelevant to this proposal.
We are only talking about Standard Mandarin here and Mandarin is not equivalent to Chinese.
We only use 'Chinese' in the draft for simplicity. The wording will be changed if this is implemented.

↑i don't know if CrystilonZ know the whole Chinese language family clear enough, so i'll add some additional things as basic background knowledge here.

ISO 639 code sets
Documentation for ISO 639 identifier: zho
Identifier: zho
Name: Chinese
Status: Active
Code sets: 639-2/T and 639-3
Equivalents: 639-1: zh
639-2/B: chi
Scope: Macrolanguage
Type: Living
Denotation: See corresponding entry in Ethnologue.
The individual languages within this macrolanguage are

1. Gan Chinese [gan] → 赣语
2. Hakka Chinese [hak] → 客家话
3. Huizhou Chinese [czh] → 惠州话
4. Jinyu Chinese [cjy] → 晋语
5. Literary Chinese [lzh] → 文言文
6. Mandarin Chinese [cmn] → 官话（普通话）
7. Min Bei Chinese [mnp] → 闽北话
8. Min Dong Chinese [cdo] → 闽东话
9. Min Nan Chinese [nan] → 闽南话
10. Min Zhong Chinese [czo] → 闽中话
11. Pu-Xian Chinese [cpx] → 莆仙话
12. Wu Chinese [wuu] → 吴语
13. Xiang Chinese [hsn] → 湘语
14. Yue Chinese [yue] → 粤语

ok, so, things above are just for electric area. there're still lots of other native language in PRC.
and i just don't post PRC's official native language list here, in case make things more complex.

since people like CrystilonZ may insist that Mandarin Chinese is the main target and other Chinese systems have none business with it, let's start from the concept level of "macrolanguage":
it actually has a property of "same standard pronunciation and style of writing".
and to Chinease as the macrolanguage, its standard, is just Mandarin Chinese.

so the truth is, all Chinese language families DO has a common standard, and also with hundreds and thousands of connection to it. when you are talking about some other Chinese family menbers, it always be effected by Mandarin system, which is the exact center of the whole topic.
if you wanna get rid of every other Chinese language families, then you need to give another complete romanisation rule, to solve some problems may happened in transcription process. otherwise, Mandarin Chinese's is automatically an official solving way. in case of that, be shall be care about this one's effection to other Chinese language families.

and also, the so called "Cantonese" is actually a concept of "languages spoken in Guangdong Province“, contained "Min Zhong Chinese", "Hakka Chinese“ and "Yue Chinese". people just usually use its narrow sense of concept: almost regard "Cantonese" as "Yue Chinese".
what's more, native language spoken in Taiwan is a kind of Min Nan Chinese, in case some ignorant one jumps out.

with all those knowledges above, we can move on:

I. How to deal with Mandarin Chinese transcription with words from other Chinese language families, but also already became a part of it?

1. Chinese archaism

it's a part of Literary Chinese, but also become a part of Mandarin Chinese.
some of them even changed meaning, and it's hard to distinguish.
if Literary Chinese is regarded as another individual language aside of Mandarin Chinese, then when meet words like "空穴来风", "闭门造车", "人尽可夫", etc, how to deal with these?

2. multi-Chinese based songs

for example, there's a Chinese song called "好心分手", one of its version is sang by both Yue Chinese and Mandarin Chinese.
so Yue Chinese romanized version is "Hou Sam Fan Sau/Housam Fansou" (actually this is jupting, a special kind of pinyin)
and Mandarin Chinese romanized version is "Hao Xin Fen Shou/Haoxin Fenshou".
both of them are spoken exactly correct, then how to deal with these?

3. with Chinese families that no romanisation rules supported
for example, there's a Chinese song called "外滩18号", which is sang by three kind of Chinese language: Mandarin Chinese, Wu Chinese and "Southwestern Hakka" (an official native Chinese language of PRC).
so it can be romanized like:
Mandarin Chinese: "Wai Tan Shi Ba Hao/Waitan Shibahao"
Wu Chinese: "Nga Thae Tze Ba O/Ngathae Tzebao"
Southwestern Hakka Chinese: "Vai Tan Si Ba Hao/Vaitan Sibahao"
i'm not sure if those ones are correct (just typed here with searching dictionary of native romanisation) aside of Mandarin ones, but it can still have chance to have the romanisation of their own part, right?
then how to deal with these?


II. Even if we shall transcript Mandarin Chinese from separated words into Latin characters, who is the one help those mappers mapping a Chinese song?

it has some part:

1. is this a Mandarin Chinese song?
   - maybe from official settings or sites, not a big deal. but will not do if you map some cult song.
2. how to get the right romanized characters?
   - ask some Chinese staff/mapper/player? i doult any of them have time/ability to do it.
3. how to make sure those things i got is correct?
   - some kind of same as the one above, if that person exsist and can do his job endlessly, he will be really welcomed to this system.

you may think most of Chinese words may not complex like that, but if you wanna build a reasonable system for rules, it should be strict.
and it's not you become the person who do this kind of work, you can hardly imagine if it's hard to do it or not.


C. Summary

I. Opinions

1. even international level groups can't do lots of romanisation for Mandarin-Latin transcription from separated words.
it's feasible, for it's truth. but it's efficiency is really really badly low.
Chinese staffs will be weary/tired out to death if they really do this. because as you see what i've explained, it's a tough work with a tough progress to do.

also i even can predict that someone wanna find a right answer of correct Mandarin romanisaton for month, and still dqed after he found the answer he got is still wrong. then it may block people mapping Chinese songs, personally i think that's really a bad news.

2. Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese has standard romanisation rules, but not other Chinese families. it's hard to complete one of you don't care all of them, for every single one of them has a common standard pronunciation and style of writing: Mandarin Chinese.

in case of that, rebuilding the Mandarin Chinese romanisation system in to a better and complete one will be a really hard work to do, and it's for sure out of osu community's range.

3. Chinese osu community already argued this for several times long time ago, and the result is still: keep the current state.

II. Conclusion

do romanisation from one by one Mandarin Chinese characters is the best way SO FAR.
until we find some genius invent a dictionary of Mandarin-Chinese-characters-Latin-characters romanisation, and upgrade the efficiency a lot more than current one.
and also, this is the exact thing what international groups do right now. (they only combine proper nouns like people's or place's name, etc.)

--------------

simple extra p.s. here:

to CrystilonZ, and other people who know little things about Chinese:

i think you had some wrong idea about Chinese characters, for i've seen written these:

CrystilonZ wrote:

Similar to Japanese, one Chinese character does represent one single syllable. However, a word is not necessarily comprised of one syllable (like Japanese, Chinese is a polysyllabic language).For example 图书馆 (túshūguǎn) as a whole means library, and writing 'li bra ry' would defeat the purpose of Romanisation by not resembling the structure of languages using the Roman alphabet.

Chinese is far different from Japanese. the syllable thing you are talking about may be just the differences between Japanese's Hiragana or Katagana, but not that true for Kanji part.
(btw, you may already know that a part of Japanese language system is just the exact Chinese.)

and now after reading all things i wrote above, you may know Chinese is not only a kind of polysyllabic language, but also the only living ideographic language.
"图书馆" reads "tú shū guǎn" and means "library", true.
However, "图书" reads "tú shū" and means "library book" or just “(picture) book", you ever know that?
this is far different from that you can't separate an English word in most cases: but you DO can separate a Chinese word, because every single character of Chinese can be a word.
eg.
图→graph, graphic, or lots of other meanings;
书→book, writing, letter, or lots of other meanings;
馆→shop, embassy, galleries or any building that showing something it wants to.

so, the one-character-one-word method is a solid reasonable metod for Chinese romanisation.

with knowledge of these, hope you can restructure your idea about Chinese, for helping you understand previous romanisation part.

--------------


hope all of these things could help you know more about Chinese romanisation.

also if you have any confusion about anything above, you are always welcomed to ask.

1. 1. You have to remember that ISO being international doesn't mean that we have to follow ISO (After all we would be breaking many of their standards, even in the other Romanisation systems). There are many references and standards that are not ISO and are better in quality and design. It's not like taking one thing that benefits you is going to help. Regardless, as I've read this standard (and if you are concerned that I may not have done some research, this is a tiny part of what I've read to make my opinions on this issue, the research is much deeper than a single ISO document), I think it benefits you less than you think it does. In fact, from what arguments you are quoting, you don't seem to understand it very well on your own (or maybe you just expressed yourself poorly, but you misrepresent the document you are promoting here).
2. 2. I already addressed this point in the previous post, but it was kinda taken out of the context. I already explained this in relation to Chinese script incompatibility. Anyway, what you're trying to say here is quite a non-sense. None of the listed languages are actually ideographic. All of these are logogram languages that partially use ideographic characters, but mostly characters that just originate from ideographic characters. The languages itself use logograms.
3. 3. This has been addressed already. There's no reason why the missing reversibility factor would impair Latin script users from reading or memorizing this (that, however, is impaired by the current system which is reversible). It only has impact on people who actually can use Chinese language, these people do have a solution. The original title/artist is still present, so they don't need to reverse it to logograms. For Latin script users, there's no reason why they would want to reverse the text.
   
   This is the part that many of you have taken out of the context, and therefore misunderstood it. Again, Romanisation (internationally), is not designed for people who are fluent in Chinese, so there is no reason why they would want to convert it back to logograms. For those who are fluent in Chinese, you literally have it in the original title/artist.
   
   "Transliteration won't do, we need to do "Transcription"" argument doesn't make much sense. Not only, as I explained above, it's really not needed in this scenario, but at the same time, you are saying this and want to support a system that omits the phonetics? That literally makes it transliteration.
   
   "we chinese ourselves even cant understand what those words said in a short time, if they are all written in Latin characters of pinyin one by one" Don't make this up. If you can't understand Romanised text, it's because you can't process Latin script, again, there's the original title/artist for you to clarify it. You are not the primary target of the Romanisation. It's more important for a regular player to be able to memorize and read the title/artist, than for Chinese player to memorize, read and understand both the original and Romanised titles/artists.

1. 1. Not worth talking about. This is a bit more out of topic and should already be clear from the previous discussion.
2. 2. The same way we're doing it for Japanese. And we are doing it for Japanese. The "Metadata Heap" Discord server is quite a big one and people do solve issues here quite quickly and effectively. Even for the languages they don't know very well. You really underestimate this community if you think it will be only and only up to staff members. Sure, they have to recheck, but if this is discussed in the channel, they generally have a good starting point. So far, I haven't seen a problem that wasn't resolved there, it really shouldn't be that big of a drama that you make it look like (And yes, even QATs/GMTs are active here, but they don't do majority of the requests on their own). This is, therefore, not an issue.

1. 1. 1. Same as for the the last point in B. This is not at all an issue. The second part of it, I don't think people take metadata DQs so negatively. I don't remember a single time it happened that people stopped mapping songs of certain language due to complicated metadata, even since metadata became more strict.
2. 1. 2. Already addressed, this is not what should be discussed. Current system doesn't solve this even though you may imply it does. It doesn't.
3. 1. 3. The result is "keep the current state" because of the conservative stance. From what I've seen, Chinese people argued for this system poorly and detached from the community that it's primarily about. Now the target community argues for something else, that doesn't mean you just keep conservative stance because we are not Chinese. The argument can never be that "it was discussed by Chinese community" because it's not only about you. We also don't say: "You can't judge most of the things because you don't know how Latin script languages work.", so don't do that to us.
4. 2. Already explained in above paragraphs.

Regraz wrote:

Regarding the Romanisation of Mandarin, I would like to post my comments here.

Firstly I would like to start with the following proposal:

Proposed Rules wrote:

The ü vowel should be Romanised into u and all diacritical tone marks should be omitted because of the technical limitations resulting from the limited amount of characters allowed in the Romanised title/artist fields.

CrystilonZ wrote:

speaking about u and v here. v is just impossible to pronounce. I'm always open for a better alternative.

Please understand first, if you want to change the current rule, namely from ü to u, you have to prove yourself FIRST u is a better choice than v, instead of announcing you are going to change it to “u” while asking us to provide a better choice. There are plenty of letters and characters could be chosen, why you chose u? Just because they look similar after omitting the you called “diacritical tone mark”? I don’t think that is a reliable reason for this change as only judging by visual appearance is pretty unprofessional when talking about romanization. Additionally, Fycho has already mentioned the potential mess that might result from changing v to u, indicating that this entry within the proposal is not only pros. Therefore, prior to this discussion, you should not simply saying “The ü vowel should be Romanised into u…” and explain this change only by why “ü” cannot be implemented by the current system due to technical difficulties but to explain why “u” is better than “v” with valid reason, ( “u” can be pronounced is not a valid reason: there are many characters that could be pronounced, like a e I o and some bi-characters like yu, which is mentioned by Fycho. All of them have pros and cons, why do you gave preference to u in thisdraft?), as well as how you are going to address potential problems if this “u” proposal is implemented.

Again, if you would like to change the current criteria, try to form up solid reasons and show people why your proposal is better than the current. Saying “I am going to change this into that, if you don’t have better choices then this will be the new criteria.” sounds pretty irrelevant, illogic, and showing kind of manipulation toward criteria about Romanization of Mandarin.

I would like to proceed to comparison between current and proposed system in the previous discussion:

Previous Discussion wrote:

1. Current system
   
   1. Titles are easy read ✘ (most of people will read every syllable as if it was one word)
   2. Titles are easy to remember ✘ (words are easier to remember than separate syllables, humans remember the words easier by their shape)
2. Proposal
   
   1. Titles are easy read ✔
   2. Titles are easy to remember ✔

I don’t think with the proposal, titles are easier to read and remember.
How do you expect speakers who don’t know how to pronounce “ü“, “v” and “u” to differentiate syllables and words under Romanisation of Mandarin?

For non-Mandarin speakers, there are no differences regarding readability between “Wo De Wei Lai Shi” and “Wo de Weilaishi” or any other combinations like “Wode Weilai Shi”. They have no idea what is a syllable and what is a word. If you think words are easier to remember (you did not post any proof or research regarding this either), why can’t a player treat the syllables as words? Now that the player have no idea what you are reading is word or syllable. There are less syllables than words in total, they should be more easier to read and memorize!

1. 1. The point at the beginning was already addressed. Again, taken out of the context. You read nothing. "v" had no linguistic basis whatsoever. The accuracy of the accent doesn't matter, even if you'd exactly hear it, if you can't speak Chinese, you won't pronounce it right. I explained why "u" has been chosen in this post. Again, nobody ever said this is the final decision. It's just that it sounds like deep and unvoiced "u", as if someone punched your chest, similar to German ü, but not the same. That's why it's "u", there was no other letter (with reasoning) suggested and "v" had absolutely no similarity to it. If you call it unprofessional, basing it on keyboard layout and not linguistics, to us, seems less professional.
2. 2. Issues of both systems (which were more severe for current system) were already addressed in this post and also in the previous posts in the proposal thread that you didn't read, otherwise you wouldn't say there are no reasons.
3. 3. Readability, we've been over it already. Even in this post.
4. 4. Yes, there is a difference for non-Mandarin speakers. Explained it previously, and as I said to Fycho, we can do the tests with people that use Latin script if you want this kind of proof.

Fycho wrote:

The main arguments are listed below:

1. If we romanise Chinese title in word-by-word way(each character must be romanised into a single, capitalised, separated word) or generally every word should be separated and capitalised according to The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography.
2. If using "yu" or "u" for the romanisation of the vowel "ü".
3. If we need to distinguish dialects from Mandarin in romanisation.

For the first point, I recommend everybody has a read about ISO7098:2015 before sharing opinions, the romanisation of Chinese is much complex than others, which needs a lot of professional knowledges about Chinese. The new proposal can't stand “a word or phrase with double or more meanings”. For example, specific examples like "他谁都打不过", it's used intentionally to represent two meanings that are "Nobody can beat him" and "He can beat everybody", "Ta / Shui / Dou Da Bu Guo" and "Ta / Shui Dou Da Bu Guo". And it wouldn't be easier to be remember / read to Chinese / non-Chinese speakers. I am not going for detail, as someone would like to give more professional explanations.

For the second point, currently, "v" stands a lot. "ü" is one-word vowel, it works differently in pronunciation from two-words-vowel like "iu", "an", "ie", "üe", "ai", "ao", etc... We use "YU" for "ü" only in passport and other specific cases, because the passport require a captial letter about the name and "ü" doesn't have captial case. In other ways, there are still "v". For one-word vowel, "v" is the most common and familiar letter and it's officially supprted, and that is what the input keyboard uses in majority. I believe using "yu" for "ü" only makes it easier to read than "v" for non-Chinese speakers, but it's technically wrong, there aren't any other beneficial cases. The "u" of syllable "yu" is vowel "ü" actually and technically, but for "j / q / x / y / w", we use "u" for "ü", but it doesn't mean "u" can completely stand for "ü", and don't mean it's "yu" can stand for "ü", "y" isn't a vowel in Pinyin system at all, "y" is a consonant that has the same pronunciation as vowel "i", meanwhile "iu" and "yu" are completely two different things. In the pinyin system, "vowels" couldn't be made from "consonant". That means, By no means could "yu" become a two-word vowel, and could "yu" be used for romanisation which disobeying the language systems totally. "v" works best at the moment.

For the third point, is it necessary to distinguish dialects from Mandarin in romanisation. As all of us know, dialects are different in pronunciation, and some have different grammars. However, all the dialects don't have an official written format, and all the dialects do have a relation with Mandarin. A lot of Chinese characters words that are stand by all the dialects, like "好心分手", you can't know if it's Mandarin or Wu-Chinese or Cantonese unless someone pronounces it, but officially and technically we can't differ and figure out what it is, and it's just modern standard Chinese, and we romanise it in a standard way. Personally, I am a dialect-used person, and I can speak Wu-Chinese and Mandarin well. The major issue is there aren't any official way that we can write the dialect. This is because, It's not like the Japanese dialects, Japanese (Hirakana, Katakana) are same as lantin scripts, which are phonograms, however Chinese characters are ideographic and ideogram, this mades Chinese characters can't be used to represent the pronunciation to dialects, and decides that there wouldn't be any officially written form dialects, and there wouldn't be any song title that writes as dialects. There aren't any official published ways to romanise the pronuciation of dialects. Therfore it's unnecessary to distinguish dialects from Mandarin. By the way, if you are likely to say cantonese(Yue-Chinese), there isn't any official written form for cantonese as well, and in HK and Macau, the school teaches the standard Chinese written form, people personally like to type Yue-Characters in cantonese, which is more like a culture. It's not taught by the school officially. Enforcing something unofficial just makes us end up with endless discussions, that's why there isn't any official romanisation way until now, because we have already argued a lot in the real world, and haven't come out a conclusion. How can we romanise an independent language that even doesn't have a written format? I believe this is beyond out of the osu! community, and it's unnecessary to figure them out at the moment.


I've asked some Chinese-spoken QAT/GMT (Nardoxyribonucleic, spboxer3 and Zero__wind) for opinions about the proposal, and all of them think it's not necessary to revise the current romanisation rules about Chinese.

1. 1. For the ISO document part, again, I want to mention this is not the only document that exists. It was taken into consideration during the creation of the proposal. But yes, it's generally good to read. I also already explained why it would be easier to remember, read and pronounce for the target group.
2. 2. No, "v" doesn't work the best, it doesn't work at all because it has no linguistic basis. That doesn't mean "u" is the best, although we agreed that it generally won't make difference for a regular player, there are still many options that can be considered, but it can't be "v", and probably not "y", because that's associated with a different sound (even in other Romanisation systems we use). "u" pronounced in a certain way will result in the "ü" we are going for, it really is the core sound of it, I described this in the post 2 times already, so I guess I don't have to repeat myself.
3. 3. It is sort of important. Because some things could be pronounced so differently that reading it regularly wouldn't be even close. Mostly, it would be just Mandarin and Cantonese, I don't believe any other dialect will be used in osu!. Anyway, sticking to the "official" systems shouldn't be considered bad. In this situation, it doesn't do any harm. In osu!, we'd preferably use whatever system works the best for us, based on the similarity to current Romanisation systems and other aspects already mentioned here (Latin script user readability etc.), it's best to keep the minority of languages up to case-by-case decision. (Most of the time, it would use this Romanisation system anyway, but in case we'd think it is needed, we would go for case-by-case, pretty common in these situations). Sticking to 100% official systems only delays us, it's a thing you have to deal with in case-by-case situations. The current Romanisation can't be officially applied to all dialects of Chinese either.
4. 4. Again, this is a conservative stance that doesn't have any proper reasoning. You either have to solve things or replace them. Not admitting that current system doesn't work because it's easier or you're used to it shouldn't override all the arguments against it.

Hollow Wings wrote:

(maybe i'm not attentive enough... )

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CrystilonZ wrote:

For point 1. I just don't see how this is related to our discussion. " In automatic romanizing working progress"

1. if osu community don't use automatic or semi-automatic working progress, it'll be manual. and i just told you all things about why that progress is complex.
2. other alphabetic languages can be romanized automatically. so that's what osu community is doing.
→
you gonna let that complex work be done by Chinese osu staffs in manual? (you are not Chinese so you won't the one do it anyway.
i prefer just get rid of that and keep what we have: automanically romanisation with one by one words.

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CrystilonZ wrote:

2. Can you quote the exact words from the document? also all the reasons as stated in the standard as well. I couldn't read it while working on the proposal because 115 swiss franc is hella expensive.

omg... you even don't have any channel or way to read that document? then you may not know lots of concepts it mentions.
and if you don't read it, then you even didn't pass my previous post's precondition, that's bad news to me.
i still recommend you try hard to find a way to read that document.

so as you just so strict about that, i'll paste some part of that document. (but since it had copyright, i just paste text here but not original pictures.)

ISO7098:2015 said:

12 Automatic transcription for named entities

In the comuputer-assisted documentation, there are two approaches to automatic transcription for named entities, namely:

- fully automatics syllable transcription;

- rule-based and semi-automatic word transcription.

since you didn't read that document, i just wanna say that:
the main part of the document are just discussions about how to transcript proper nouns (or just "names") of places and persons.
that's what i summed up for that in previous post about ISO7098:2015.

and i emphasize this again: at international level, most of Chinese words are still transcripted into one by one characters in Latin characters of pinyin.
ISO7098:2015 just made a small step: make proper names combined.
the romanisation of Chinese in ISO is far more uncompleted.

i don't think osu commutity can do what ISO wasn't able to do.

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CrystilonZ wrote:

Read more about ideograms here. These are logograms. Modern Chinese characters are logographic.

A number of lines after this are about pinyin being a method of transcription. No comments there this is acknowledged since the beginning that this is just the way to pronounce stuff. And the next few lines are about Mandarin having a lot of homophones.

seems like you are really obsessed with concepts, maybe it's my bad to simplify those things.

then let me explain clearly: the ideogram i called Chinese character, is one of its property, like other ancient ones.

so called "logograms" is not Modern Chinese character's exact definition. let's see what ISO7098:2015 showed:

ISO7098:2015 said:

2.6
ideophonographical character
graphic character (2.6) that represents an object or a concept and is associated with a sound element in a natrual language.

EXAMPLE Chinese hanzi 鹤(crane), Japanese kanji 戦(war) and Korean hanja 册(book) are ideophonographical characters.

just mention: hanzi (Chinese), kanji (Japanese), and hanja (Korean) reads similar right? they all came from the common source: Chinese characters (汉字). and that is the exact "Chinese character" i pointed out at my prevous post as a ideogram.

and addtional knowledges here: you may know that, at the VERY FIRST, alphabetic characters are ideographic charcters as well. people comes later just get rid of their meanings and just use those characters as a tool to complete words, which didn't happen to Chinese.
(like you saw a character "m" and you may see nothing or you can see everything, that's not what Chinese characters do.

now we are clear to compromise with concepts: the Modern Chinese character is a kind of ideophonographic character.

(and also you may know that both ancient Chinese character and alphabetic character are ideographic character.)

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CrystilonZ wrote:

This is not exactly true. If it were Mandarin would have been dead a long while ago because the only way to communicate would be carrying a crap ton of paper with you at all time and write stuff when you want to communicate.
In English context it would be equivalent to you guys seeing or hearing /tīm/ (IPA stuff. This reads time). Intuitively the first thing that come into your heads would be the time. Tick-tock clocky stuff. However under different contexts:
"Can you buy me some /tīm/. I'm going to use it to cook dinner." In this case /tīm/ is the herb thyme.
"I don't have enough /tīm/ to do my homework. It's due tomorrow." In this case it's "time"
"Two /tīm/ two equal four." In this context it means multiply. 10/10 grammar.
As you can see they are reversible with context. And when you guys speak to each other you're actively tracing back to the original Hanzi characters using their pronunciation. Therefore, saying that it is not reversible is not true. It's harder in Mandarin (410 syllables - crap tons of words. Do the maths) but the fact that there are people speaking Mandarin proves the fact that it's possible.

lol

NONSENSE.

i think you still don't have enough cognition about how Chinese words and sentences can become.

again, you CAN'T simply know what those Chinese character exactly is, until you need to fully understand all of conponents both in and out of it.
if you just get the sentence without any other notice, you will never be able to do that, which means that sentence's meaning is various.

here are some examples:

a. one best example here, which shows that if you make mistake with it, you may got big trouble.
"Gu Niang, Shui Jiao Yi Wan Duo Shao Qian?"
this sentence mainly has two meanings:
1. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i buy a bowl of your dumplings?" （姑娘，水饺一碗多少钱？）
2. "Hey gril, how much it costs if i sleep you one night?" （姑娘，睡觉一晚多少钱？）
this widely happens in electric alphabet systems without tones, just like osu system.

b. a more common one here.
"Jie Dao Shou Zhang Zai He Shang"
this is too complex, i just do some transcription, and you may just do your mathematics mapping and see if you can figure out all of that sentence may means:
1. "Jie Dao" → 接到(catch/catch up/get/take/etc.), 街道(street/road/way/etc.), etc.
2. "Dao Shou" → 到手(already get sth./reach your hands/etc.), 倒手(transfer things between hands/buy in&out/left hand/etc.), etc.
3. "Shou Zhang" → 手掌(palm/people you trust/etc.), 首长(boss/highest level person/etc.), 收账(charge/blackmail/etc.), etc
...
oh hell, i won't continue.

this also happens even you have words separated:
"Jiedao Shouzhang Zai Heshang"
↑ maybe try your best to figure out what this means, and i can predict that you may find out at least 4 of meanings.

that's why i'm always saying why it's complex:
alphabetic characters can be transliterated immediately, even if you don't know what that word means.
and this won't work to ideophonographic characters, expecially Chinese characters.

and that's also the detail part of why it's not reversible.

c. some special meme here.
"Shi Shi Shi Shi Shi"
non-Chinese speakers may have no idea what's this.
but it's a popular article called "施氏食狮史" which is a best example to show how hard it may effect us to just read Chinese with only pinyin (or romanized Latin characters).

if you insist your opinion then try to figure out what this sentence means:
"Ji Ji Ji Ji Ji"
just mention: that's also a wonderful article in Chinese writing.

this is just one form of Chinese meme, there're tons of others in Modern Chinese.
like "爷爷", "不星", etc.

this is what general phenomenon in Chinese language environment and its romanisation like.

Latin-Chinese transcript is not reversible, is the exact truth.

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if you think separated words of pinyin in Latin characters as the romanisation of Chinese characters is better,
then you are wrong.

as a pure system, it's better ofc.
because it helps non-Chinese people read and understand.
and actually it's the very last of goal Chinese romanisation want to reach.

but in all of other sides, it sucks.
1. automanical works can't be done, so it need manual ones, which is tough and complex. you are not the one do it, so you won't understand.
2. you still need deep knowledge to know "what is a Chinese word" before you want to search some. that's just worse because it's harder.
3. osu staffs are not language specialists. they are the best at mapping or mapping checking works, but not at language area.
4. etc. (too much and just stop here

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the standard of Chinese romanisation is not even build up, "The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography" is just a tool to show rules we have a way do it, it doesn't mean we can really do it.
it's also why we call transcription for separated words of Chinese romanized words is "semi-automatic", becasue part of it is still manual, and will always be manual for a long time.
unless our AI tech is upgraded to a really high level that it can analyse that complex Chinese sentence, and do the rest just what alphabets languages' transliteration had already done. (or maybe you can just know some Chinese language specialists and pay them to do this work.

thou i've told you truths about how complex the separating work for Chinese words, here's some other ISO document conponents:

ISO7098:2015 said:

10.7 At present, in Chinese linguistics, there is no clear common definition of a Chinese word yet, so it is difficult to decide the boundary (dividing line) of a common Chinese word sometime, and, of course, it poses difficulty to link the monosyllables to form a common polysyllabic Chinese word.

sure metadata of osu maps is important, but this topic is far from what osu community could do.

waiting for next progress then.

1. 1. Again, nothing is going to be "up to Chinese staff", they don't even communicate about metadata much. It doesn't need to be automatic. Japanese is also not automatic. Your assumption that people who are not Chinese can't do Chinese metadata is incorrect. There are people who do it (e.g. in the aforementioned Discord server for metadata), some do it more reliably than Chinese people. There are many people who look up Japanese characters one by one and they are very accurate with it, even though you have to think of exceptions (there are even Chinese alternatives that are more accurate, btw.). This is not a problem again, unless you assume that where you are born determines what metadata you can do, which is not true.
2. 2. I don't understand why you would enforce some "preconditions" in your post. I understand you want people to do some research, which is okay, but remember it works vice-versa.
3. 3. Ancient Chinese was not an ideogram language. You've also proven CrystilonZ right, you just used different terms.