Why aren’t Chinese words spelled how they phonetically sound? “Feng Shui” is really pronounced “Fung Shoy”. Why not just spell it that way? We use differen’t alphabets, so there’s no reason not to have phonetic spellings (unlike French, where words like ‘faux pas’ are pronounced ‘fo pa’ yet we keep the spelling because we have the same alphabet).
The system commonly use is called the Hanyu Piyin. In fact, there are accents which go with each character (‘feng’ is one character, ‘shui’ is one character.)
I don’t know how to input accent here nor am I well-versed with my Hanyu Piyin, but ‘feng’ pronounce one way is “wind”, when pronounced with another accent could mean “phoenix”.
I am assuming you mean pronuncing in Mandarin. There are several hundreds thousand dialects out there of the Chinese language – Mandarin being one of them.
>> There are several hundreds thousand dialects out there
Methinks someone is a bit exagerative
And Splanky, what makes you believe the English pronunciacion of letters is the “correct” one? It isn’t. The Roman alphabet was developed by the Romans and Romance languages have kept the sounds of the characters much closer to their originals. It is English sounds which are out of whack.
Taking that into account, the Chinese developed Hanyu Pinyin as a standard for the Romanization of their language because there were so many conflicting methods. They used the more standard values iof the Roman characters, except in some particular cases where they adapted characters to sounds peculiar of Mandarin.
I have never heard it pronounced “fung shoy” before.
I thought that was a weird way to explain the pronunciation too. Splanky got it from Dex’s Staff Report. At first I thought that might be a Cantonese rather than Mandarin reading. Could anyone better versed in the tongue of Guangdong confirm this?
Pinyin was meant to be fairly systematic, but you always run into problems adapting a writing system to a tongue it wasn’t invented for. Because some Chinese phonemes don’t exist in Latin of Romance languages, or even English or German you end up having letters that have, to a western reader, strange readings. For instance, off the top of my head, some of the most confusing ones are:
“C” is prononced somewhat like “ts”
“Q” to a native English speaker sounds a lot like “ch”
“X” on the other hand is a lot like “sh”
Because this is GQ, I’ll nitpick the op:
a) Chinese is written with the same alphabet as English, namely the roman alphabet.
b) Chinese, of course is also written with its own system, but it’s not an alphabet (in which each sign usually represents a phoneme) but a system of ideograms.
You are correct. In Cantonese it sounds more like “foong sui” (“Wind water”). Whereas the transliteration is from Mandarin. Always a danger to say “Chinese” without qualifying the dialect…
[aside] The same word for “wind”, “foong”, gives us “Dah foong” (punching wind), which was transliterated as “typhoon”. [/aside]
Oh, and before I forget, “foong pei” is the Cantonese slang for fart. It means “thrown wind”. 
Technically speaking the word “alphabet” is correct as it would denote any set of characters. I guess the word "code"would also do, even when referring to the Roman “code”.
It isn’t just ‘Feng Sui’. The philosopher ‘Lao Tzu’ 's name is pronounced ‘Laozi’. A few dynasties- ‘Qin’, ‘Zhou’, and ‘Shang’- I have heard these pronounced ‘Chin’, ‘Chow’, and ‘Chang’. ‘Zhengzhou’ is “Cheng Chow”. ‘Sima Qian’- ‘Szu-ma Ch’ien’. ‘Xianyang’- ‘Hsien-yang’.
That’s because there is confusion between different romanization systems, namely pinyin and Wade-Giles. Wade-Giles is an older system but it’s still very common outside of mainland China.
Lao Tzu is W-G, while Laozi is pinyin.
Peking is W-G, Beijing, pinyin.
Like I said above, to an English speaker, Qin and Chin sound the same, but in Mandarin, “Q” and “CH” are two different sounds. Both pinyin and W-G have different ways of addressing sounds like “Q” or “X” that don’t quite exist in English, thus arises part of the confusion.
Actually, I’d say that an alphabet is a system wherein each sign represents a phone, not a phoneme. Phonemes can have more than one phone. A syllabary is one where each symbol represents a syllable. Sequoyah’s system and the Bo-Po-Mo-Fo are both examples of a syllabary. Pinyin is an example of an alphabet, but not an example of an English alphabet. If you really want to get technical, hie on over to www.sil.org and you can get more than you ever wanted to know about the International Phonetic Alphabet (the one used to represent the sounds of every spoken language, not the one used in radio communication).
>> Actually, I’d say that an alphabet is a system wherein each sign represents a phone, not a phoneme. Phonemes can have more than one phone
Well, that may be your definition but in information theory an alphabet is the set of al posible characters to be transmitted or stored.
Websters:
1 a : a set of letters or other characters with which one or more languages are written especially if arranged in a customary order b : a system of signs or signals that serve as equivalents for letters
They do not have to be phonetic at all. They can be just different signs or symbols.
Here’s a comparative guide to the differences between the Pinyin, Wade-Giles, and Yale systems of romanization of Chinese:
http://www.m.isar.de/denner/neijia/romanisation/mapping.html
Here’s the same thing in a chart:
http://www.wlu.edu/~hhill/tlit.html
As people have already said, no romanization could possibly satisfy everyone.
Well, sailor, you have to remember that I’m majoring in Linguistics and thus will have a linguistician’s definition of alphabets and syllabaries.
I think the W-G and pinyin translations was what I was looking for. I still find it annoying though when they spell it one way and tell you to pronounce it the other.
Thanks.
You are still not getting it. The value of letters when spelling Chinese is not the same as when spelling English. Just the same as the sounds of the letters in Spanish are not necessarily the same as in English. You are not reading English, you are reading Chinese. I do not understand why you think the English pronunciation is any more valid or natural than that of any other language. If anything, as I have explained, it os LESS valid.
Isn’t the objective here to translate Chinese into English? Why not use English phonetics then?
The French can spell Bejing or Peking any way they want to. 
The objective is not to translate anything to anything but to learn how to read the so-called transliteration of Chinese characters into Pinyin letters.
I understand it now (no, I really do!).
Nope, the object is transliterative romanization of Chinese.
Bearing in mind the huge number of English accents and dialects, you’d have to have several thousand transliterative systems to have an “English translation”. And since Wade Gile and pinyin already exist, then there seems no point in adding further confusion.
A glance at Vietnamese reveals a romanized way of writing an East Asian language that doesn’t relate to the way in which we pronounce English - how do you pronounce “nguyen”, for example. This is because it was transliterated by a French linguist several centuries ago. If one wanted to have an “English translation”, one would have to rewrite the entire Vietnamese alphabet (actually, this isn’t the best example, since the Vietnamese themselves now use the roman alphabet, except in ceremonial contexts, but you get my point I hope).