P.S. “Tamsui” comes from the Dutch rendering of “Tam-tzui”, as they had no way to render “tz”.

I have a post on my new site related to the issue of Taipei street names. It may be of some interest to your readers, as may also be this large chart comparing various romanization systems. (It is more comprehensive and also, I believe, more accurate than that of the GIO.)

Also, Mutant Frog, it simply isn’t true that zhuyin is less ambiguous than pinyin. Both are ambiguous at the single character level. For example, in pinyin “i” changes depending on whether it follows “j,x,q” or “zh,sh,ch”. In zhuyin the word 重 is spelled ㄓㄨㄥ. However, if each zhuyin character were read separately and then put together it would make the sound “zh+u+eng” => “zhueng” (sounds roughly like an English like jwung).

However, both pinyin and zhuyin are 100% accurate at the syllable level, and Chinese characters can be converted to either with no ambiguity about what sound should be made. Pinyin and zhuyin can also be converted back and forth between each other completely accurately with no loss. Of course what isn’t possible is to take pinyin or zhuyin like bo2 ㄅㄛˊ and make a 1-1 mapping into a Chinese character. 柏,勃,博,薄, and 駁 all have that sound.

I totally agree with John about the tones. It’s great progress that at least Taibei is finally using standard pinyin on their signs, but with the tones it would be a lot nicer for the businessmen and tourists who just study a few weeks of Chinese before they come. It’s not that hard to learn pinyin well enough to be understood when reading it plus a few dozen characters. But, learning how to just read the characters for EVERYTHING is thousands of hours of work.

Mandarin and English just have way too many phonetic differences for any good romanization system to really exist. Japanese is at least much closer, and you don’t have the problem in Japanese like you do in Chinese where multiple Chinese sounds each sound most similar to the same Engish sound—Japanese maps one to one pretty well.

The needs of someone who just needs a decent approximation at place names and proper names, are completely different from those of the language learner, who needs to easiy distinguish sounds which are different in Mandarin but sound identical to most English speakers. Pinyin in way too many ways fails the “is this the spelling which, when pronounced by an English speaker who doesn’t study Chinese, sounds closest to the correct Chinese of any possible spellings?” Renders it insanely annoying for the occasional users.

As an accurate phonetic description of Mandarin I find Pinyin, and every other Romanization system, a bit confusing. I used Pinyin for both semesters of elementary Chinese in the States before I came to Taiwan, but the local Bopomofo system (which I just taught myself recently) gets rid of all of those problems. By not using Roman letters at all, it takes away all the ambiguity.