Saturday, February 4, 2012

Zengcheng vs Jungseng

Subject: RE: Zengcheng, Jung Seng etc!
Date: Thu, 9 Jan 2003 11:42:01 +1300

Dear Helen, Allen, and others,

OK, this is the problem of rendering Chinese sounds in Roman script! My
non-Chinese students in Chinese history have always complained about this
problem, when they find pronouncing Chinese names and terms hard
enough! And the problem is even more complicated for Cantonese! Many
Chinese characters are pronounced differently in putonghua (Mandarin,
Beijing speech, or the national language, guoyue) from how they are
pronounced in Cantonese - and they are often pronounced differently by
Hakkas or by people from different districts or even villages, most
specially those from Siyi (Sze Yup) or Zhongshan (Jungshan)

Lets stay with our own ancestral district. The two characters for our
district mean: "to add, to increase" and "city walls", and the name means
"added city", and first got its name in 201 AD.

In Mandarin the characters are romanised in two main ways: Ts'eng Ch'eng in
Wades-Giles (the old British romanisation, which is still used in Taiwan),
and Zengcheng in pinyin, the romanisation system of the People's Republic
of China, which has now been adopted universally, except Taiwan, after a
ruling in the 1970s by UNESCO.


That is why I use Zengcheng, though no Cantonese in Australia or NZ will
know where I come from!


The situation is VERY complicated in Cantonese and I know I am going to
worry Allen and Arthur!

In the old Meyer-Wempe Cantonese romanisation system our ancestral district
is Tsang Sheng
In the Yale system it is Jang Sihng

In 1960 the Guangdong Provincial Government decreed it should be Jeng Xing
However in 1971 the Provincial Government changed its mind and it is now
Zeng Xing

Note I have a Cantonese Dictionary published in Guangzhou (Canton) in 1999
that uses Jeng Xing and another official dictionary published in Guangzhou
in 1997 that uses Zeng Xing.

If the Provincial Government cannot make up its mind, you can see how
complicated it can be if you do cannot use characters and just know how to
pronounce them!

But that is not all. The major textbooks used in Hong Kong to teach
non-Chinese Cantonese are by Sidney Lau and you guess it??? He uses a
different romanisation system of his own!!! And our homes district
becomes: Jang Sing

My Cantonese friends in Sydney recognise the sounds Jang Sing or Jeng Xing
but when I pronounce the Mandarin Zengcheng - they do not know where I come
from!

I thus prefer to use Jang Sing in Cantionese, and Zengcheng in
putonghua. When I am with those who read Chinese - I use the actual
characters!

Allen and Arthur: I know where the "Tung" in Tung Jung comes from - but
how come we use JUNG????


Do not change the names of our associations now!! However the problem is
that Jung is the romanisation for the Cantonese sound for central as in
Jung Shan or Zhongshan, a major source of overseas Chinese. There is, then
a confusion between Jung Seng or Jung Sing, and Jung Shan. Indeed the two
"Jungs" are pronounced differently and are, of course, two different
characters.


Actually, this has already led to confusion in Australia. One of our
leading Australian oral historians has published on the web her interview
with an elderly Chinese who comes from Jang Sing, our district - I know
that because he is a member of our Sydney Luen Fook Tong, the Jang Sing
association, and he is a Wong from Bak Shek. I have criticised the
Australian, non-Chinese speaking, historian for her very leading question:
"You are from Zhongshan aren't you?" To which old Wong Hoy Lee, who is more
westernized than me, and knows no Chinese at all, simply answered "Yes,
that would be it." That is the problem of a non-Chinese historian
interviewing a non-Chinese speaking Chinese about Chinese matters!!!!

Sorry, this has become another long posting. More practically, perhaps one
of the things that should go on the Tung JUng website would be a list of
Chinese characters and their various romanisations for the Jung Sing
villages and surnames??

Best wishes to all.

Henry

(Zengcheng is spelt in many ways - jungsen, and so on. Henry Chan can
explain in much more detail the reasons. Regards Allen

H.D. Min-hsi Chan
Honorary Visiting Fellow
School of History and Philosophy of Science [formerly STS]
University of NSW
and
Honorary Associate
Department of Chinese Studies
School of European, Asian, and Middle Eastern Languages and Studies
University of Sydney

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