puer, what happened to the "h"? (2026 Update)

I suspect it has to do with the gradual advance of Pinyin as a standard for transliterating Chinese characters into western alphabets. In the western media, for example, you hardly ever see "Peking" any more as the name for the city. (As the name for the university, yes, but...) By the way, do you know where the H in Pu-erh came from originally? It isn't Wade-Giles, is it?

/Lew

It looks like the final represented as 'er' in Hanyu Pinyin in W/G *is* 'erh' (though with a circumflex on the e; can't do 8 bit charactes on this).

Yes, I'm quite sure it is Wade-Giles transliteration. My older Wade- Giles Chinese English dictionaries list it as such. I hate Wade-Giles.

I hate pinyin. And Chinese homework. More than Xinyang Maojian ...

Pinyin is handy. It's far much harder to associate sounds with characters when you're not given any kind of transliteration system that makes sense. And it's much easier to type when you know pinyin or guangdong pinyin. I always had to learn characters the hard way by memory - without any kind of tranliteration.

The only way which worked for me (or nearly worked). Characters (symbols) carry meaning and any transliteration only approximates pronunciation. Pinyin (to me) was and is reading (approximate) phonetics, wade giles the same, and since Chinese is a language with a very limited number of common phonemes any transliteration reads as abstraction. But ...

Why it's useful. Computer age. More and more Chinese are learning pinyin by default as a result!

And I am actually not so against a decent Xinyang Maojian, Jim ...

ImT

Sure, characters often carry some meaning, but rarely the *whole* meaning. And the phonetic components of characters, where they exist, are often an imperfect guide to pronunciation. To take just one example, the glyph for Bai2 (white) is the phonetic component of Pai1 (to pat.)

In a way, the problem is similar to the problem of spelling in English, where words' spellings crystallized at various times in the last several hundred years. Real-world pronunciation, though, continued to change, leaving us English speakers with spellings that are bitterly mocked by nearly everyone except native speakers with a gift for spelling.

In Chinese characters, I think the problem is even worse. The characters were codified, for the most part, long before English spelling was, and since then both the pronunciation and the semantics have drifted.

/Lew

I dont know whats worse, learning to spell English if you are a Chinese speaker, or the brute force of learning the meaning of roughly two thousand characters to become literate in Chinese if you are an English speaker. After that they are combined into n-tuples to form other meanings.

Jim