A Note on Romanization and Terminology

I have given most Chinese words and names in today’s pinyin system for romanizing the pronunciation of putonghua or the “common speech,” a form of the Beijing dialect that the People’s Republic officially declared the national spoken language in 1955. However, no adequate system exists for converting the many sublanguages and dialects of Cantonese into the Roman alphabet. Since scholarly consistency is nearly impossible, I have generally followed the path of least resistance by using the spellings that tended to be most popular among Cantonese Americans or familiar in the English-language American press (e.g., Sze Yup instead of Sei Yap). I also generally adopt the English spellings preferred by the owners of proper names (thus, Yuenren Chao instead of Yuanren Zhao) and refer to the northern dialect by the convenient term of “Mandarin” instead of trying to follow the twists and turns of various names proposed for it after the 1911 revolution.