Groans from the libraries
"Xurely you zhest," wrote Nancy May in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe. "Now 1 have trouble with dzylophone and dzerox, and I still can't pronounce Xiaoping." Eugene Wu, director of Harvard University's Yenching Library, sounded depressed. "I don't even want to think about it," he moaned.
Ms. May's oddly spelled worry and Mr. Wu's woe were both responses to the virtually worldwide acceptance by news organizations and academic institutions of a different system of spelling Chinese names in English, called Pinyin. The changeover was started by...
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