I mean the "Q" sound we could spell as "Ch". The "Xi" sound we could spell as "Shee" But I completely agree, what matters is consistansy, and the Han Yu romanization works just fine.
There's a good reason to spell
qiang differently than we spell
chang, though. You could argue that the
i indicates which one it's supposed to be, but
q is a fundamentally different consonant from
ch. So much so that native Chinese don't confuse them for each other - if anything, they mix
ch with
c. (Insert mental image of Taiwanese person saying "Ni yao ci fan, si bu si?")
Though I do wonder how it is that 佛 is "fo" and 多 is "duo" why isn't the former "fuo" or why isn't the latter "do"?
There's actually a reason - if you read the Wikipedia article on Hanyu Pinyin it explains the who story.
Fo actually IS
fuo, but in those certain sounds they decided to leave out the U for conciseness. They couldn't do this with
duo, because
duo contrasts with
dou. There's no
fou to worry about.
I think the whole notion of trying to pin down a correct (or standard) spelling in the roman alphabet for a word from a language that doesn't use the roman alphabet is both humorous and doomed to failure.
Personally, I kinda like that there are multiple spellings of Kadaffi floating around.
It's rather important, though - especially for character-based languages where people who are functionally fluent can be illiterate but still need a way to negotiate the language. If someone's name is written as "Mr. Chang," and I'm not sure which Romanization system he's using, I don't know whether to call him Mr. Qiang, Mr. Zhang, or Mr. Chang. Same with place names. In Taiwan there are three separate Romanization systems still floating around (even though Hanyu Pinyin is at least legally considered to be standard now), and if you have to take the train to Xinzhu and the sign at the train station says Hsinchu, how well are you going to find your way there?
