Every word in the Dào Dé Jīng, including its title and author Lâozî, has been transcribed to Roman letters in many different ways: Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, Lao Tse, Laotze, Lao Tze, etc… In this project, I mainly use current Mandarin Pinyin when writing the words in Roman letters. The received versions I’ve seen have transcribed the Chinese characters into Mandarin pronunciation, the largest Chinese dialect group, spoken by 70% of Chinese speakers and typical of the northern part of Chinese. Sometimes I do break syllables into different words when technically I shouldn’t, namely with Dàodé Jīng itself, but it’s become custom.
A few little notes which I will augment from time to time:
- Here’s a list of the tones and the corresponding symbols you see over some vowels:
- First tone: a level and higher pitch, mā
- Second tone: rising, start from a lower pitch and end at a slightly higher pitch, má
- Third tone: falling rising, start at a neutral tone then dip to a lower pitch before ending at a higher pitch, mǎ
- Fourth tone: falling, start the syllable at a slightly higher than neutral pitch then go quickly and strongly downwards, mà
- I use the carrot-top (mâ) over vowels instead of the mark for the third tone—the one that looks like a v (mǎ)—because my Mac doesn’t have that kind of mark. I apologize for this. I am sure there’s a quick fix, and it’s on my list to figure out what it is.
The Dào of Lâozî 