BOOK REVIEWS
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Anderson then marks stressed syllables with a 'perpendicular apostrophe', leaving atonic syllables marked with their basic tone but identified as atonic, or neutral, by the absence of a stress mark. This of course ruins his attempt to eliminate diacritics and is in the long run uneconomical by requiring all stressed syllables to be marked for both stress and tone. It would seem more appropriate in an approach of this kind either to mark neutral tones in some positive way or to mark first tone and leave neutral tones unmarked. This would make it possible to write an utterance in which each syllable had one and only one mark for the suprasegmentals.
But the important question is not whether Professor Anderson's goals are valid or whether he achieved them in his proposed transcription system. Ultimately the acceptance and survivability of such a system depend less on linguistic and economic considerations than on practical ones such as the number of reference works, elementary language texts, and other publications using the system. Predictably, much more attention would be given to Professor Anderson's innovations if they were used in a new dictionary or a new conversational text. He is fighting a difficult battle when the most common language texts are in Yale or Pinyin romanizations, the most useful Chinese-English dictionaries are in Wade-Giles or Yale, and most books, libraries, and newspapers still use Wade-Giles and the Post Office spellings.
As I have pointed out already, most reactions to romanization systems tend to be personal and subjective, and in this light I would like to give my own feelings. I feel that although Wade-Giles is well established in many areas of sinology there is no strong reason for trying to sustain it with new systems derived from it. As a matter of fact I believe that the changes made by Professor Anderson are extreme enough to have created something qualitatively different and not merely a 'Simplified Wade'. His new system might be able to stand on its own if supported in text-books and dictionaries but this rests on so many unpredictables that one cannot be optimistic.
If Peking ever seriously begins to publish in Pinyin, all the other systems will become fossils in the library. Until then each of us will do our own thing and every student of Chinese will be forced to learn at least four systems in order to follow publications in the field. I see the principal merit of Professor Anderson's book to lie in the fact that it has very conveniently compiled for us the four