The discussion of "Romanization of Chinese" should stop until we figure out from these posts. You are free to discuss after that.

Now for the sake of not getting the thread flood and return to a normal discussion about other stuffs, no shitposts, no non-helper posts, no flame or personal insult, action will be taken if necessary. Behave yourselves, otherwise you shoulder the responsibility.

quote="F D Flourite" Maybe I'm not complete to read the whole thread because there are much about ignoring things. I just want to say some intuitive thoughts about the language Chinese.

First of all, still many Chinese type in English to search title of Chinese songs in osu! for the sake of consistency. Personally, I'm used to type pinyin to search for song title because osu! in the past had poor support on unromanised searching (maybe it's because many maps from 2012 and earlier only have their romanised one, both for Chinese and Japanese songs, as metadata at that time was not much forced).

Before I say anything, please don't read what I have to say already thinking about how to refute it, or argue against it, or prove me wrong. Some things I actually agree with you on so please try to actually consider what I'm saying.

melloe wrote:

Thirdly, to address the problems of grouping together romanized Chinese syllables into words. It is true that in grouping together syllables there is a lot of ambiguity, but much of that ambiguity should be able to be cleared in context. For instance, taking this charming example provided to us:

Hollow Wings wrote:

"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？）

Context should be able to very easily clear up such ambiguities. What is the song about? What is the rest of the song saying? Context will provide an almost effortless resolution to such conclusions, which I imagine would comprise the vast majority of such instances.

However, some of those ambiguities will be purposely rendered in the form of puns etc., such as here:

Fycho wrote:

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".

These will most likely make up such a negligible percentage of these instances of ambiguity that to go through with the proposed changes and deal with these intentionally ambiguous titles as they come up would not be completely remiss -- but I personally believe that even these hypothetical cases, however rare, should be considered before pushing any changes. That is just my opinion, ultimately it's not up to me.

In fact for many contemporary Chinese ballads, their titles are deliberately came up as such (in the form of puns). As for the first example given here, the song title can still be sexually suggestive even if its formal title is about dumplings. Because Chinese lyrics are not as logical as daily language,
and people just can easily get the ambiguous meaning because there is no way to distinguish their pronunciation difference in a song-wise tone without logical context. "Context will provide an almost effortless resolution to such conclusions" as you said is often not the truth. Joint of Chinese characters into a single word will often cause loss of meaning in this way. (I have more examples, one of which is my uploaded map)

I think you must misunderstand me, because I am pretty much in agreement with you on this. As for the first example, if the song content itself is not sexual in nature then naturally the song title should be not sexually suggestive. However, I have already said that puns are intentional ambiguities that cannot be resolved by any combination of word groupings, and that that is one reason to not go through with the proposed changes, which is actually what you said--we are in agreement on this. Let me clarify, I am not flat out taking a single stance with every paragraph I type, I am just offering my own opinion on different matters regarding this topic, sometimes in favor of the proposal, sometimes against.

Fourthly, about "v" vs "u." To Chinese speakers of course "v" makes the most sense, as that is the input they use in their everyday lives, but to the western audience, "v" will make absolutely no sense. "u" and "yu" are both inadequate romanizations of "ü," because "yu" will be pronounced "yoo" by most westerners, but "v" will be next to useless for everybody except for Chinese players. "v" is more ambitious in that it serves to correctly represent a specific sound instead of simply approximating it, but for western osu players it is completely counterproductive.

I'm not sure if you go through the HW's post thoroughly but there was an example given to prove that the change from "v" to "u" will result a worse case under certain conditions: “绿光” & “露光” will be both romanised in "Lu Guang" while their actual pronunciation are completely different. For non-Chinese speakers, I don't think it can be a better way either to pronounce it or to remember the title by any means. Ofc I understand that "v" has no connection with the actual pronunciation of "ü". I was also confused when I first used a keyboard to type Chinese. However, this is just a general knowledge for all Chinese users and Chinese learners. That's how we Chinese grow up. So even we may understand that "v" can be senseless in pronunciation manner,
I don't get why non-Chinese speakers have the advantage to ignore such knowledge (which is common to us) at all. When you want to memorize a title in a different language, accepting its small piece of rule/regularity (actually it's really small) is not demanding is it? In fact for the pronunciation of Japanese romanised way of "ra" (similarly, ri, ru, re, ro), the actual pronunciation is far from /ra/, but somehow similar to be in the middle of /ra/ and /la/. Personally I'd even say it sounds much closer to /la/ in general. But when you have to memorize it, you simply accept its setting of being forced "ra". That's the same thing.

Again I am offering a two-sided view, so that anyone who reads my post (if they don't want to slough through the other very, very long posts) can have multiple perspectives to build their own opinion off of, perhaps I should have made that more clear. For proposal: v makes no sense to westerners. Against proposal: u is not the same as ü, so "v" is a better choice if we want to be exactly precise about that particular vowel instead of just approximating it with "u," the tradeoff being of course that westerners will be confused.
Non-Chinese will not even know to look up the usage of "v" at all, unless you go around and tell everyone, they will just accept it as a strange aspect of the Chinese language and continue pronouncing it "el vee" or "lvvv" or "liv," instead of actually pronouncing it "lü."
In Japanese the IPA notation /ɾ/ as in ra ri ru re ro in English is simply marked as "r" instead of getting its own special character--in other words, we are approximating the pronunciation. And I suspect many non-Japanese have not even memorized that fact, and if they know that "ra" is actually /ɾa/ it's only because they have heard it from anime or something. If we were to do the same for Chinese, we would be again be approximating the ü sound by labeling it "u."

Lastly, Chinese is generally referred to as logographic rather then ideographic, as a character represents a morphheme rather than a more nebulous concept, and as ideogram usually refers specifically to a symbol that is independent of any corresponding sound--although of course no logographic writing system is without a phonetic component built into it. The terms themselves are rather fuzzy anyways, so to achieve anything of actual accuracy one has to resort to such ungainly terms as HW's "ideophonographical." However, to call Chinese logographic is not incorrect. In fact, most people, even linguists, do it.

I don't know how you call Chinese logographic so steadily so I just want TRUE evidence. And I don't even want to read Wafu's post again because he was simply doing this once and once again without compelling support. Anyways, the most intuitive thoughts of the language Chinese is still ideographically, based on how we accept Chinese education for more than 12 years. Many words that combined by two or more characters are also generated by the joint of meanings of those characters together. For example, “未来”(future) can be split as “未”(not happening) and “来”(come). And the easy joint would be "has not come yet", which is the close meaning of "future". And the word “银行”(bank) can be split as “银”(silver, which is the general currency in ancient China) and “行” (an organization/commercial firm focusing on specific fields, pronounced as Hang). And it's obvious that the joint of those two meanings an organization/commercial firm focusing on money, which is bank.

Do the words ideograph and logograph mean something to you that they don't to other people? You seem quite adamant on this. I only mentioned this matter as a very unimportant one, which is why I put it last. The terms ideograph and logograph themselves are very nebulous, ill-defined, any usage of either will not be very accurate unless you append extra stuff to make something long and complicated like "ideophonographical." In my experience, an ideogram is something that represent a particular idea or concept. 上 would be an ideograph, and Chinese for 1 2 3 would be ideograph. However, 的 is not really a concrete concept, it's more of a morpheme (the smallest unit of meaning in a language), like the english -ly or -ing. Concepts, too, can be morphemes, so the label "logogram" cover both complete concepts as well as morphemes. However, this topic is ultimately really quite trivial and not all that important to the discussion at hand, so if the words "logogram" and "ideogram" have a definition to you that I'm not aware of and it's extremely importanat to you that Chinese be called "ideographic," I'm more than happy to comply.

The third example would be my own map https://osu.ppy.sh/s/598869 “花儿纳吉” (The actual correct pronunciation should be Hua Er Na Zei, which is different from normal Mandarin pronunciation Hua Er Na Ji). This title has no direct meaning from Mandarin as it's from minority Chinese language (Qiang language). The official meaning is "Being happy like a flower". However, the song title still has its similar meaning to the combination of Mandarin in Chinese culture , which was also part of intention by the song author: “花儿” is flower, “纳” is containing/accepting, “吉” is happiness. If being wrongly considered as logographic, the song title would be less valuable, which is what we cannot accept. There are just thousands of more examples so I have to stop here.

As a result, I completely don't understand why you guys keep trying to call Chinese logographic by any means. It's highly COUNTER-INTUITIVE. And in fact the change of combining characters is highly impractical (as you wanted to state below the opposite way) in this way, because simply consider each character as pronunciation (as logographic indicates) will result in MEANING LOSS and CULTURE LOSS, which is definitely a wrong way to approach to Chinese language.


Again, with how adamant you are on this topic of logo/ideograph--does ideographic and logographic have a meaning I'm not aware of? I don't have any agenda in calling Chinese logographic, that's just what it is according to the definition of ideo/logographic that I have. Maybe you have a different or more correct definition, in which case feel free to teach me.

If we are to talk about practicality, then you have to consider perspectives from both sides. Impractical to whom? You have to remember that many non-Chinese don't speak Chinese and don't know anything about Chinese meaning or culture to begin with, so joining words will not result in any meaning or culture loss for them. The only difference for them is that it will be easier to remember. Of course it will be impractical to Chinese speakers, but for English or other non-Chinese speakers it will be easier to remember song titles (I have talked about this earlier, and included relevant quote), this is what I mean by practical.

To the crux of the issue.

The real dichotomy here is between practicality and officiality/aesthetics. That is a highly subjective discussion and is conducive to many (as seen here) tetchy discussions. Grouping words together will almost certainly make it more convenient for non-Chinese speakers, there should really be no question about this. I personally don't even pay attention to the name of a Chinese map if it's over three or four characters long; the profusion of capitals and spacing, to my English-speaking mind, is simply inconvenient, and I would rather memorize the mapper's name, the artist's name, and the background instead. Japanese titles, meanwhile, are multisyllabic, and I would rather have a few multisyllabic words than six monosyllabic words. How closely we adhere to "ISO 7098" really should not be a question. We're a small international circle-clicking community, not an official international organization, so shouldn't we rather consider things from a functional, practical perspective?

Sorry but I just think the way of changing is even more impractical for the reason stated above
Yes, it will be impractical for you as a Chinese speaker, but I was talking about practicality for the many non-Chinese people who play this game. Let me bring in what you said later to Wafu and address that point:

Just an observation: You're trying to prove that it's easier to memorize and to pronounce for non-Chinese speakers, but we have tried super hard to prove that you haven't gone through Chinese and there are tons of fact that counters your idea of making the romanised result to audience easier and better. But I don't see your reaction of ever acknowledging that, which is very disappointing in a discussion.

I'm a native English speaker, and even after having learned some Chinese for some years as a child, it is still much easier for me to remember Chinese titles if they are grouped together into longer bundles that, visually speaking, more closely resemble "words" such as one might see in English. I have addressed this in the second point of my original post. (Also I tested it on some non-Chinese speaking friends without context, and here are the results: for some people, a Chinese word is easier to remember when separated by syllable, IF there are about three or less syllables overall. For longer titles, maybe four syllables or above, grouped words is easier to remember.

Context after here is not holding new idea so I delete them in my post. But anyways, I'm completely not convinced how changes on Mandarin/Chinese metadata would help it be more practical. On the contrary, they're ignoring the general case of Chinese and making things even worse.
I think you have to understand the argument from both sides--this is not just for this particular issue, but a life lesson for everywhere. Of course these changes will seem 100% silly to you, because you are Chinese, but you have to consider it from a westerner perspective: they don't know any Chinese, and for them grouped words are much easier to remember, because grouped words more closely resembles our own language.

However, again, just as you should consider everything from different perspectives, I already have considered it from a native Chinese-speaker's perspective and I have already said why I support the status quo, some of those arguments you have repeated here. Even if it doesn't change your opinion, it is good practice to truthfully consider other perspectives and be generous to them.

Also, I did not know that Chinese so heavily depended on romanization to search for Chinese songs in osu, which is why I asked about it, so definitely thank you for providing that information, I'll take your word for it. More reason to keep status quo, I guess?
/quote
can't embed more than 2 quotes within each other lol

Hi, I have some serious concerns regarding the romanisation of emojis, as they are not mentioned anywhere in the proposal.

What would be the most acceptable method of romanising emojis when there are no measures to keep consistency? For example, the 😀 emoji could be romanised as :-) or , whether the nose is included becomes a subjective matter which needs to be avoided for metadata rules.

Hence I propose for consistency

When romanising emojis that contain faces, avoid using noses as they are fairly uncommonly used

In addition, how are symbols with no clear emoticon meant to be romanised? There is no clear way to express 🍆, 👺 or 💩 with basic latin unicode.
Using discord format such as :weary: k_hand: :sweat_drops: really doesn't have the same effect

In addition, there are cases where emoticons have characters that are not accepted under traditional romanisation such as ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ, not to mention the presence of kaomoji which have no clear method of romanisation such as (⁎⚈᷀᷁ᴗ⚈᷀᷁⁎). How should these circumstances be handled when dealing with songs that use emoticons like these?

abraker wrote:

The reason I mention this is that some maps in 8k mania tend to be either 8k or 7k+1 and it's impossible to know until you download and check them out.

In that case it probably belongs to the osu!mania RC, anyways you should suggest wording and bring a bit of discussion on the topic if you feel that this is worth to add to the guidelines here or there.

are we good on word-by-word romanization for Chinese and if not, can someone cite why in less than 200 words?

keep in mind that the ONLY thing that matters re: romanization is that the title itself can be readily linked back to its source material, we're not after translation or context preservation or anything like that, only transliteration

please and thank you

unicode emoji can be converted to their nearest native equivalent for transliteration's sake, if they dont have one (ie: eggplant, etc), then they dont get ported, ez

Ephemeral wrote:

keep in mind that the ONLY thing that matters re: romanization is that the title itself can be readily linked back to its source material, we're not after translation or context preservation or anything like that, only transliteration

Well that's kinda important. Because in UBKRC, we actually considered the compatibility within osu!. There was that agreement that if it's possible, we should choose what is similar to Modified Hepburn, to keep the metadata consistent etc. (I believe it was for Cyrillic and Chinese)

If that is not the case now, the current system is indeed better, but the "ü" to "v" should be discussed.

I tried to summarize from the whole discussion, and the romanisation of Chinese method will be status quo (word-by-word method).
Adjust the wording of it a bit to avoid misunderstanding. Whoever disagrees the method of romanisation rule feel free to contact me in PM and I am willing to explain it to you.

Glossary:
Character-by-character Romanisation: Each Chinese character must be Romanised using Hanyu Pinyin system, and each romanised character must be capitalised and separated with a space.

Rules:
Songs with Chinese metadata must be Romanised using the Character-by-character method in Romanised fields when there is no Romanisation or translation information listed by a reputable source. The same applies to the Source field if a romanised Source is preferred by the mapper.


Below are things that we haven't reach an outcome, which still need to be public discussed:
The romanisation of "女/吕"(Nü / Lü)'s vowel "ü". Current we have two choice "v" and "yu". Here are the pros and cons.
v:

1. It's consistent with current ranked maps, players who can't speak Chinese wouldn't struggle to search songs.
2. "v" is the most common and familiar way to Chinese native speakers and leaners, and it's used in the input keyboard. People who learn Chinese will have to know "v" if they start typing pinyin.
3. It couldn't be read properly by English speakers as it's not a vowel in English.

yu:

1. It could be read easily by English speakers.
2. English speakers would read it "yoo", which has different tone from "ü" (I can't find an proper English word to express the correct tone of "ü").
3. "y" is consonant, "yu" is made from one consonant and one vowel while the original is one vowel "ü".

Feel free to drop opinions about it.

Closest pinyin sound to ü is "yi" btw. I can see why "yu" would be read as "yoo" cuz you naturally make "oo" sound with u. You naturally make "ee" sound with i. "yi" is closest imo as someone who speaks mandarin and english, what do you think?

Monstrata wrote:

Closest pinyin sound to ü is "yi" btw. I can see why "yu" would be read as "yoo" cuz you naturally make "oo" sound with u. You naturally make "ee" sound with i. "yi" is closest imo as someone who speaks mandarin and english, what do you think?

I can agree with that. It's not exact, but way closer than "yu" or "v", at least if you read it as in any other romanisation system we currently use.

@Fycho ""v" is the most common and familiar way to Chinese native speakers and leaners", nobody does that. Majority of people will still write "ü" and if you use the "v" on the pinyin layout, you will end up getting "ü" anyway. "v" is associated just so that you memorize where it is on the layout, not because of any relation to the character.

About the whole v, u, yu, whatever thing. It's not like people who don't know the language would pronounce things right anyway. For example, anyone who doesn't know Spanish would know that ll is not pronounced as l but /ʎ/ <- this thing, yet I doubt anyone would change how the Spanish word is written (since it's in the Latin alphabet already I guess?)

Similarly, we have æ ø å in Norwegian/Danish (and ä ö å in Swedish) which usually just get changed to ae, o/oe, aa, at least in Norwegian. The ø kinda sounds like the i in first, while å is like the o in old.

My point is kind of that even in languages that use the Latin alphabet, they have their own sounds and sometimes characters that there's no way to accurately approximate, so the priority should rather be on making it unambiguous and easy for foreigners to type and communicate the title as accurately as possible.

Why don’t we just allow Unicode characters to be used when submitting beatmaps and we can solve all our problems? (serious)

Kroytz wrote:

Why don’t we just allow Unicode characters to be used when submitting beatmaps and we can solve all our problems? (serious)

Because searching would be much more complicated. Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc. and wouldn't find anything in the end.

CXu wrote:

Similarly, we have æ ø å in Norwegian/Danish (and ä ö å in Swedish) which usually just get changed to ae, o/oe, aa, at least in Norwegian. The ø kinda sounds like the i in first, while å is like the o in old.

Yes, but "ae", "o/oe" and "aa" seem to have a basis in pronunciation, at least. "v" is a choice based on keyboard layout. Which will not be even close if you actually try to pronounce it.

Monstrata wrote:

Closest pinyin sound to ü is "yi" btw. I can see why "yu" would be read as "yoo" cuz you naturally make "oo" sound with u. You naturally make "ee" sound with i. "yi" is closest imo as someone who speaks mandarin and english, what do you think?

In my opinion "yi" is not feasible to be implemented since there already exists "yi" as a syllable in Pin Yin system. Using yi will produce new confusions.

I think, "yu" is not a better choice than "v" since when combined with, for instance, "l", or other consonants, the pronunciation (under the prospective of a non-Mandarin speaker) is quite deviant from what it supposes to be (in Mandarin).

Fycho wrote:

It could be read easily by English speakers.

Also, before you try to regard "easier to pronounce for non-Mandarin speakers" as an advantage of any other choice than "v", you need to make sure whether the pronunciation of the new choice is, at least, inclined to the correct pronunciation of that in Mandarin, otherwise, the "easier to speak" statement will not be a valid reason. Since "yu" is far more from being similar to ü, it is already disqualified itself for having the advantage in pronunciation.

ü in Mandarin, is quite a special one. Almost none, I mean, including v itself have priority or advantage from the aspect of pronunciation, as it is almost impossible to find an approximate incarnation, I mean, an alternative or representative of ü from the alphabet used as a reference in the Romanization process.

Another example in Pin Yin is “x”, for example “Xue”, of which the pronunciation also differs from English. So why it is not brought up in the draft, to replace x with other characters when Romanization? Many other examples could be raised up here but I guess this is enough.

One cannot expect Romanization to teach them how to speak a language, though it might help people to get some insight about the pronunciation of it. Navel-gazing on finding alternatives that serves the “pronunciation” nemesis-like task people presumptuously equipped onto the process of Romanization is pointless. Therefore, I would appeal people to discuss from other aspects – treat v, yu or no matter what characters equally as to this point of view.


When I was writing this reply, I spot another post in the thread so I would like to add something more here:

Wafu wrote:

nobody does that. Majority of people will still write "ü" and if you use the "v" on the pinyin layout, you will end up getting "ü" anyway.

Are you sure nobody does that? And are you sure you will end up getting ü? What do you mean by “pinyin” layout? Input method? Softwares? Human-machine interfaces? If so, why osu! cannot do that? Asserting by vocabularies like “nobody” is not convincing, you might need to provide evidence to support your idea.

Wafu wrote:

Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc. and wouldn't find anything in the end.

So what do you actually mean? You posted "Majority of people will still write ü" while "Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc."

Fycho wrote:

For the TV Size thing, drop some opinions:

For example this song: https://osu.ppy.sh/s/477045
The song has a game ver that without "~TV animation ver.~", and has a TV ver later that labled with "~TV animation ver.~" to distinguish. They are different in Instrument and lyrics. In this case, (TVsize) aren't necessary but not for "~TV animation ver.~". That popular "~Anime Ban~" is pretty similar stuff.

I believe there is a metadata discretion when handling things like this.

Well if it's from the TV version the mapper should use "~TV animation ver.~" and then the game version it shouldn't use "~TV animation ver.~" I think I basically repeated what you said aaaaa

Wafu wrote:

Kroytz wrote:

Why don’t we just allow Unicode characters to be used when submitting beatmaps and we can solve all our problems? (serious)

Because searching would be much more complicated. Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc. and wouldn't find anything in the end.

You could add the alternate romanizations in the tags so that it does pop up when searching tho. If a title had “lüe” then you’d add “lue” and “lve” into the tags and now people can search them. I dunno, seems simpler to do it that way imo. Keep original title, and add the complicated multi-spelling stuff into tags

Wafu wrote:

Kroytz wrote:

Why don’t we just allow Unicode characters to be used when submitting beatmaps and we can solve all our problems? (serious)

Because searching would be much more complicated. Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc. and wouldn't find anything in the end.

CXu wrote:

Similarly, we have æ ø å in Norwegian/Danish (and ä ö å in Swedish) which usually just get changed to ae, o/oe, aa, at least in Norwegian. The ø kinda sounds like the i in first, while å is like the o in old.

Yes, but "ae", "o/oe" and "aa" seem to have a basis in pronunciation, at least. "v" is a choice based on keyboard layout. Which will not be even close if you actually try to pronounce it.

Aa has no relation to the pronounciation of å other than å looking similar to a. There's also still the ll in Spanish for example, which isn't pronounced like what an English speaker would think.

As for the v, I'm pretty sure in older Latin (I think) the letters u and v were interchangeable, so in that sense it's not too non-sensical if we consider it to be a language-specific thing. Many other languages have these things that are pronounced differently, that anyone who wishes to pronounce foreign titles properly, would have to do at least a minimal amount of research anyway.

Regraz wrote:

Wafu wrote:

nobody does that. Majority of people will still write "ü" and if you use the "v" on the pinyin layout, you will end up getting "ü" anyway.

Are you sure nobody does that? And are you sure you will end up getting ü? What do you mean by “pinyin” layout? Input method? Softwares? Human-machine interfaces? If so, why osu! cannot do that? Asserting by vocabularies like “nobody” is not convincing, you might need to provide evidence to support your idea.

Wafu wrote:

Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc. and wouldn't find anything in the end.

So what do you actually mean? You posted "Majority of people will still write ü" while "Majority of people couldn't type characters such as ǔ, ü, etc."

Let's take stuff out of the context again, nice. You can't be serious at this point.

In my response to Fycho, we were talking about Chinese speakers and learners. Of course, this is about the keyboard layout used in pinyin input methods. Why would I use layout in relation to software or human-machine interface, when we talk about inputting characters? These people, who actually use the pinyin input method will press "v", which, on its layout, will allow you to write these Latin characters (not only ü, depends on type of input method, there is not only one) that are not available in regularly used input methods.

osu! cannot do that, because players would have to swap their keyboard input method if they wanted to search for Chinese metadata.

Stop asking for evidence for things that don't require it (you can search any text in pinyin for that). Majority of people (who use pinyin input method, not talking about regular users, in case you wanted to take this out of context again) will use the ü characters, because it's correct and they know how to do it with the pinyin input method. The proof is that most of the Chinese transcribed text available on the internet, does indeed use these characters, in fact, I haven't seen any officially transcribed texts that did use "v" rather than "ü". I have only seen either the classic pinyin method using all the special characters, or replaced with the original character.

My response to Kroytz was about osu! players, not about people who do use pinyin input method. osu! players are generally not able to type these characters because they are not using the pinyin input layout. Stop mixing two irrelevant posts together and taking them out of the context just to "prove me wrong".

@CXu: "u" didn't exist in Old/Classical Latin and "v" was pronounced as "u", indeed. But it's not very likely that people know that to not pronounce it as "v" in modern Latin script. Even if they read that as "u", it wouldn't be very close, that's why the discussion is important and why it's important to just not let it to something so minor as a keyboard layout used in pinyin input methods.

i'm going to start handing out silences with respective length to overall wordcount in posts if people don't start focusing on discussing things that actually matter and helping to push the draft forward

out of "yu" vs "yi" (with the caveat expressed above that "yi" exists in pinyin already) vs "v" (with the caveat that using v as a vowel is a ludicrous proposition for any english speaker, native or otherwise), which would be the most "expected" use in the context of an everyday, average reader/player with no knowledge or understanding of the language?

answer in <200 words only plz

Ephemeral wrote:

out of "yu" vs "yi" (with the caveat expressed above that "yi" exists in pinyin already) vs "v" (with the caveat that using v as a vowel is a ludicrous proposition for any english speaker, native or otherwise), which would be the most "expected" use in the context of an everyday, average reader/player with no knowledge or understanding of the language?

answer in <200 words only plz

In my opinion, for average reader/player who knows nothing about the language, it would be "yi". "v" without any knowledge will be always pronounced as you see it, "yu" would be pronounced as "yoo", "yi" would be pronounced as "yi". The only thing missing here is the accent needed to pronounce it properly, which player with no knowledge will not use intuitively anyway.

Okay keep it short. I would support v since:
1. “v” is how Romanization of Mandarin input via keyboard, no matter what speaker;
2. both “yu” and "yi" are impractical since the pronunciation of it is not related to ü as well as y is a consonant, which is conflict with the idea of ü (vowel) too. (This is to clarify that they own no advantage over v according to pronunciation or vowel-consonant thingy);
3. Outside osu!, “v” is more commonly used than “yu” and "yi". Using "yu" or "yi" will be more confusing, from an everyday and average point of view, when they find "v" in other places.
4. Use of v for ü has a larger user database. But there are hardly people using yi or sth for ü since it has been used somewhere else in the Pin Yin system.

For the sake of people who don't know how to pronouce "ü" correctly,

open http://hanyu.baidu.com/s?wd=%E6%B7%A4, then click the blue voice logo of the site and hear it. http://hanyu.baidu.com/s?wd=%E9%A9%B4, click blue voice logo to hear the "ü" with a consonant and tone.

Also we focus on discussion wether it should be "v" or "yu", whoever is interested in why, contact me via PM and I will tell you.

I will make another summary merging "ü" to the main proposal of romanisation of Chinese when stuff gets discussed adequately.

I'd go with v.

Pronounciation in foreign languages isn't going to be mapped accurately anyway (ll in Spanish, å -> aa in Norwegian), so in my opinion it's better to make it "nonsense", making people who would like to pronounce it properly look it up, rather than pronouncing it wrongly (I wouldn't pronounce yu as ü, for instance), and it distinguishes between lü/lv and lu just fine.

Just as someone reading "llamo" would say "lamo" without prior Spanish knowledge, I think it's fine to expect some knowledge when someone want's to pronounce romanized chinese properly.

@Ephemeral

Not a mapper, but here's my take on it.

Yu and yi both already represent sounds in their own rights (鱼 and 一, for example), so there's space for confusion there. ü represents a different sound that I feel isn't properly conveyed through either yu or yi. The average player pronouncing lyu and lyi would say something like "lew" and "lee" respectively, when the actual sound is more like "lui".

So I think it's better for non-Chinese-literate players to realize that it has a completely different pronunciation by using v. They will eventually memorize the spelling, even if they don't know the word (but they will realize that it IS a different word, which might not be the case for yi or yu). Meanwhile, because v is used in place of ü when typing in pinyin, Chinese people will also have no trouble looking up maps.

Both have hefty pros and cons.

"v" is accurate representation of "ü" so for Chinese speakers/typers it is 100% ideal. However, it's ludicrous for anyone without prior knowledge of "v" usage, so many people, especially in the West, will be completely baffled.

"u," "yu," and "yi" are all equally inaccurate ("ü" happens to fall right between "yu" and "yi"), they are only approximations and thus not perfect. "Lu" will be "loo"; "lyu" will be "liu" or "lai yoo"; "lyi" will be god knows what. There's too much ambiguity. However, all of these are far closer to the truth than "v" for non-Chinese speakers.

None of these are ideal and make heavy compromises, so I think we should just keep the status quo "v" until we can find/implement a better solution, such as the one Kroytz suggested earlier: https://puu.sh/zRitU.png

However, out of the two, I personally prefer "u" or "yu," but I only chose "v" because tha thappens to be the status quo.

romanisation isn't for the people that speak the language. it is for people that can't who wish to (as accurately as possible) pronounce and process what they are reading.

using "v" should not even be considered, so please do not even consider it. if native people are offended, they can turn off roman display.

i believe "yu" is the only correct answer here.

Okay, time to make a summary again. Here is the modified draft of the proposal, it’s not final yet, feel free to suggest if I miss something.



Lüe and Nüe are substituted with Lue and Nue instead of Lyue and Nyue because of the following reasons:
1. Lue and Nue do not exist in the pinyin system. Substituting Lüe and Nüe with Lue and Nue respectively does not cause any ambiguity.
2. The model of substituting ü in this proposal is based on what is used in Chinese passports. Chinese passports change Lüe and Nüe to Lue and Nue as well. Lyu and Lue are in the GB/T. (only applied to People name)
3. Lue and Nue are more friendly to people that do not know how pinyin works and are easier to pronounce compared to Lyue and Nyue.
4. "üe" is technically same as "ue" in terms of pronunciation.

Anyone has concerns are free to contact me, I am willing to try my best to explain stuffs.

romanisation isn't for the people that speak the language. it is for people that can't who wish to (as accurately as possible) pronounce and process what they are reading.

If that was the case, shouldn't titles that are fully in ascii still be romanized? I didn't have the faintest clue how to pronounce "Tijdmachine" until I heard the song. This is also heavily dependent on the readers' native language. To me, "Teidmaschien" would be a very accurate transliteration since I'll pronounce things german when in doubt, to an english speaker it'd (I'm assuming) be "Tidemachine".

The "v" vs "yu" thing is similar, if you want to give me an easy pronunciation guide, just "ue" will do as that's the german non-unicode alternative to "ü" (and the sound is very similar to how it is in chinese). Both "yu" and "v" will give me the wrong idea.

It's true that "v" as a vowel is unpronouncable to most westerners, but CXu has a good point about it being equal to "u" in original old latin script, and I'd say old latin stone engravings are perfectly readable.

im hearing stuff about allowing players who speak english to be able to pronounce titles that arent english? i speak both mandarin and english i think im allowed to have some kind of opinion

when people who primarily speak english see the word "sage" or "mote" they'll probably pronounce it as they think in english. couple it with a few japanese words romanized and it'll sound completely different, especially to osu!players. this is mainly due to how osu! is such a largely japanese influenced game. its sort of a cultural difference at this point. those outside of osu! might even butcher the pronounciation of the other romanized japanese words as well, to no real surprise.

i see no real reason for "v" to not be used because its already so established to chinese players. its how the unique sound is pronounced and theres no two ways about it. "-yu" simply looks too unnatural, and it sounds a whole lot more butchered than what its trying to emulate. i dont see why people cant pronounce "lve shi" and "lve yourself" differently. why cant "v" be simply an osu! culture as well?

because literally 0 western readers (who the romanization is aimed at) will read v as a vowel...................................................................................

Naotoshi wrote:

because literally 0 western readers (who the romanization is aimed at) will read v as a vowel...................................................................................

Didn't we have multiple chinese people in this thread saying that the romanization is important for chinese players as well?

Even then to me personally it makes no difference whether I can intuitively pronounce it or not, the important part is having something I can read and type so I can find the song again.

Naotoshi wrote:

because literally 0 western readers (who the romanization is aimed at) will read v as a vowel...................................................................................

I think it is still better than misleading players to pronunce wrong.

peppy wrote:

romanisation isn't for the people that speak the language. it is for people that can't who wish to (as accurately as possible) pronounce and process what they are reading.

using "v" should not even be considered, so please do not even consider it. if native people are offended, they can turn off roman display.

i believe "yu" is the only correct answer here.

https://soundcloud.com/gloriorbelli/in-paradisvm
Here is a song with title in Latin using v as vowel which is in accordance to Oxford way of typing Latin. IF some day someone maps this song, are you indicating that we shall change the name to In Paradisum instead? I don't think that makes sense, so why do you oppose "v" in the first place?

Emilia wrote:

i see no real reason for "v" to not be used because its already so established to chinese players.

peppy wrote:

romanisation isn't for the people that speak the language. it is for people that can't who wish to (as accurately as possible) pronounce and process what they are reading.

using "v" should not even be considered, so please do not even consider it. if native people are offended, they can turn off roman display.

Again, romanisation was never aimed at native speakers in the first place, so whether it is estabilished and comfortable to chinese players shouldn't really matter here.

peppy wrote:

romanisation isn't for the people that speak the language. it is for people that can't who wish to (as accurately as possible) pronounce and process what they are reading.

using "v" should not even be considered, so please do not even consider it. if native people are offended, they can turn off roman display.

i believe "yu" is the only correct answer here.

Eh, I think there's more than just pronounciation that's important here. There will be confusion if a non-native speaker tries to talk about a song with a native speaker, if the choice of romanization is different from what native speakers are used to. It's kind of like if we were to transliterate "llamo" to "yamo" for Spanish songs, to closer represent the actual sound.

We also already have cases where we're not as accurate as possible, such as the use of "x", or where "yi" really just sounds like i. Japanese romanization also differentiate between ei and ee, oo and ou, even though they sound the same.

In my opinion pronounciation should just be one priority off many when it comes to romanization, and other factors such as ambiguity should be taken into account, and if possible, should stay as close to the original language where possible.

As for using v specifically: letters in general tend to have different pronounciations in different languages already, so I feel like when someone sees the v and have trouble saying it, they'll realise it's probably pronounced differently.


@Rayne: Well, it doesn't need to, but wouldn't it be more convenient if native speakers and non-native speakers were on the same page when writing song titles to each other? In this case, yu isn't actually the right pronounciation anyway, so it doesn't really have any added benefit over v, other than teaching people how to pronounce it wrong. If you have to learn the pronounciation anyway, why not go with the one native speakers are using already, and that leads to less ambiguity? That's how I see it anyway.

Youmu Chan wrote:

peppy wrote:

romanisation isn't for the people that speak the language. it is for people that can't who wish to (as accurately as possible) pronounce and process what they are reading.

using "v" should not even be considered, so please do not even consider it. if native people are offended, they can turn off roman display.

i believe "yu" is the only correct answer here.

https://soundcloud.com/gloriorbelli/in-paradisvm
Here is a song with title in Latin using v as vowel which is in accordance to Oxford way of typing Latin. IF some day someone maps this song, are you indicating that we shall change the name to In Paradisum instead? I don't think that makes sense, so why do you oppose "v" in the first place?

No, because it's the way of writing Old/Classical/... Latin which doesn't need Romanisation. If we want to establish a rule about Romanisation, we simply find which Romanisation system is the best, keep the Latin script characters as is and figure out how to replace the special characters that we can't use. And it has to be based on something that objectively makes sense to a regular player who knows nothing about Romanisation or that language.

"v" in pinyin is has no basis other than what you press on the keyboard to write it, it could as well be "k" because you would technically be pressing "k" on Dvorak keyboard layout. Either one makes no sense, because regular user has no chance of knowing that in pinyin input method, this would actually produce ü.

We should differentiate Latin and Latin script without mixing it much. In any case, even if we considered that "v" was (u was added to Latin in 16th century) pronounced "u" in Latin language, ü still doesn't sound like either "v" or "u".

Wafu wrote:

No, because it's the way of writing Old/Classical/... Latin which doesn't need Romanisation. If we want to establish a rule about Romanisation, we simply find which Romanisation system is the best, keep the Latin script characters as is and figure out how to replace the special characters that we can't use. And it has to be based on something that objectively makes sense to a regular player who knows nothing about Romanisation or that language.

"v" in pinyin is has no basis other than what you press on the keyboard to write it, it could as well be "k" because you would technically be pressing "k" on Dvorak keyboard layout. Either one makes no sense, because regular user has no chance of knowing that in pinyin input method, this would actually produce ü.

We should differentiate Latin and Latin script without mixing it much. In any case, even if we considered that "v" was (u was added to Latin in 16th century) pronounced "u" in Latin language, ü still doesn't sound like either "v" or "u".

To me this is saying

Original language uses Latin script while it only makes sense to native speaker and makes totally no sense on pronunciation to non-native speaker (Polish, Latin for example): OK
Original language doesn't use Latin, so Romanize it into something that only makes sense to native speaker and makes little sense on pronunciation to non-native speaker (Using v in Chinese Romanization): NOT OK
Original language doesn't use Latin, so Romanize it into something that makes no sense to native speaker and makes some sense (but not accurate) on pronunciation to non-native speaker (Using yu in Chinese Romanization): OK

I am now completely confused by the intention and philosophy behind the metadata system

in my opinion, whatever thing chinese people use to input characters should be used, this way you avoid people having trouble figuring out how to romanize their own language (like when you change wo for o in japanese)

we should avoid middle grounds where neither native nor foreigners understand the romanization process fully

Do people realize that players will most likely mispronounce it anyways, even more if they dont have any previous knowledge of the language?

peppy wrote:

romanisation isn't for the people that speak the language. it is for people that can't who wish to (as accurately as possible) pronounce and process what they are reading.

That's completely true, the problem is that romanization isnt accurate, mandarin has multiple tones and meanings for words that sound exactly the same to a non-native, romanization is just supposed to help you refer to something to other non-natives, the way you pronounce something doesnt really matter as long as the other person understands what youre trying to say

Honestly, if ü isnt sonorously close to either yu, yi, v or u, just use u instead since it would auto-correct if you were to search it on google or whatever and then do the tags thing that kroytz suggested for easier search in-game and on the website

Also, why dont we just add like a button to the website so we can see what the original, non-romanized title is?

Hi
I highly suggest everyone here read both of these https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/p/6557643 https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/p/6557415
I'll elaborate and add some points here.

Fycho wrote:

yu:
English speakers would read it "yoo", which has different tone from "ü" My description of the vowel ü is like this: firstly shape your mouth like you're going to pronounce the word "you," but instead of a vowel that sounds like oo (in moo) do a ee sound (like in bee or he) instead. Do not change your mouth's shape

asked around a bit and Nyu is pronounced like nee-yooh (like a very exaggerated new). The first portion gets the sound right and the second portion get the mouth shape right. Just sharing information lol this is no relation with stuff down there.

My opinion about this is that Romanised texts should be kind of familiar-ish to any english speaking person and give a rough hint of pronouncing the actual sound. However, the pronunciation needs not be perfectly accurate all the time and pronunciation does vary a little bit depending on the speaker's mothertongue. Here are some examples:


If you have zero knowledge about Chinese of course you're probably going to get a bunch of pronunciation messed up unfortunately(I did too lmfao ask fycho).
But that does not mean we should give people something they can't even pronounce. It's unsettling and will probably be really weird to many people, which should not be a feature of any Romanised text.

also this is mentioned in Fycho's post but it seems like it's skipped over by most.

Any questions can be directed at me or Fycho.

Linguists and native speakers don't be mad at me pls I know the pronunciation is not exact either and I suck at linguistic stuff sorry

Fycho wrote:

If saying "v" couldn't be readed by foreigners and makes misconception, then we probably need to rework the Japanese rule as ra / ri / ru / re / ro are actually pronounced as la / li / lu / le / lo in Japanese, which is kinda unfriendly towards those latin scripts users who don't know Japanese. English speakers will pronounce "ra" differently from how it's supposed to be pronounced in Japanese.

this is technically wrong, Japanese uses a pretty happy marriage of both "r" and l"" consonants, using the full mouth formation for "r", but also pressing the tongue very slightly on the roof of the mouth, making a soft 'l". since the full formation "r" is used, it more so correlates with English "r" than "l", and Japanese people (varying on dialect, of course) will recognize this, even through the imperfection of those specific characters by westerners.

regardless, that cannot be said about "v" in Chinese. i have almost no background in Chinese, but i can at least assure using a consonant sound that has nowhere near the same mouth formation/articulation of the sound it is actually trying to produce does not work well. there has to be an unfortunate compromise between perceived transliteration, and vocal articulation.

i don't know what the solution would be, as again, i don't have any Chinese background, but going with the options that are based on actual vowels would work better than "v" in general