Yenching May Have to Adopt New Transliteration System

The Harvard-Yenching Library, the nation's largest Chinese library, may have to convert to a new system of transliterating Chinese characters into English that would entail creating a separate card catalogue written according to that system.

Eugene Wu, librarian of the Harvard-Yenching Library, said yesterday that the library has been using the Wade-Giles system of transliteration since it opened 50 years ago, but the Chinese government's decision on January 1 to publish all its foreign-language publications by the Pinyin system may force East Asian libraries to convert to Pinyin.

The switch "would be tremendously difficult," Wu said, adding, "I don't even want to think about it."

Phonetic Problems

Ronald C. Egan, assistant professor of Chinese Literature, explained yesterday that because the Chinese language assigns sounds to characters that represent whole words, Chinese cannot be broken down into phonetic elements or letters as in English.

Several systems of transliteration to relate Chinese script to the 26-letter Roman alphabet have been used in the U.S., Egan said, but until recently Wade-Giles was the commonly accepted system.

Go With the Flow?

"It's probably a good thing to switch because the Wade-Giles system can sometimes be a little misleading." Egan said. "But it would be a frightfully large undertaking for the library to convert. There are hundreds of thousands of cards in the catalogue all written in Wade-Giles," he said.

Wu said. "It might be very, very expensive to switch. And it would add some extra burden on Chinese students who would have to learn the Pinyin system. Unlike the newspapers, which just have to occasionally change a name, we would have to live with the system day in and day out."

Wu said he was waiting to see if the Library of Congress and other East Asian libraries switch to Pinyin before deciding whether the Yenching Library should convert. "We also intend to talk to faculty and students. If the faculty very much wants Pinyin, I suppose we'll definitely have to switch," Wu said.

Patrick Tseng, Chinese area specialist for the Library of Congress, said yesterday. "It is very possible that we will switch, but we don't know when yet." Tseng added that if the Library of Congress does convert to Pinyin, other Chinese libraries will probably follow suit.

The New York Times does foresee a slight adjustment problem for its readers because of its decision to switch to the Pinyin system. Theodore Shabad, editor of the Foreign News Desk of The Times, said yesterday.

"But the theory we have is that the average reader cannot tell all but the most common Chinese names apart anyway, and the specialists will probably want to learn the new system," Shabad said.

The Chinese premier's name "Hua Kuo-feng" in Wade-Giles--would become "Hua Guofeng" in Pinyin. Egan said. The Chinese word for China. "Chung-kuo," is "Zhangguo" in Pinyin.

"It's a big change and it may cause a lot of trouble, but Pinyin isn't harder to learn at first than Wade-Giles," Egan said.

Wu said publications from Taiwan would retain the Wade-Giles system "since Taiwan doesn't want to follow any system of the Chinese's."