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7 Controversy

Debate continues about the actual suitability of pinyin as a Chinese romanization method. This argument revolves around pinyin's unconventional use of Roman letters, of which the phonological values of some phonemes are quite different than that of most languages utilizing the Roman alphabet. Some sinologists praise this as pinyin's flexibility in that it allows the entire Roman alphabet to be adapted to the Chinese sound system (compared to Wade-Giles, which leaves out or underuses many letters); others, however, point out that pinyin letter values are hence so unconventional that they guarantee a very large number of mispronunciations in a non-Chinese reading the romanized text, again, in contrast with Wade-Giles. However, as not only the PRC but by now most institutions and publications have adopted it, the debate seems increasingly obsolete.

8 External links

8.1 Auto-converters

8.2 Other

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