Why is it that Asian words aren’t spelled phonetically when written in English? Sometimes they are, but often they are not. For instance, feng shui(if I’m not mistaken) is pronounced fung shway. Why not spell it that way? After all, the original words were written in characters unrelated to the English language. Who decides how they will be spelled in English letters?
First of all, Asia is a very big country, with lots of languages, including some (e.g., Indonesian and Vietnamese) normally written in the Latin alphabet.
Secondly, with Chinese words like “feng shui” there are several systems used to write them in the Latin alphabet, the commonest system being Pinyin. However, those systems are built around how the Chinese pronounce their words, and not around English rules. It’s exactly the same as when you have words in other languages using the Latin alphabet: the Italian word “dive” (meaning goddesses) is not pronounced the same as the English word “dive”, because Italians speak differently. A system like Pinyin is that way because it works well for Chinese sounds – and those sounds are often quite different from English.
Aw, now, don’t be modest. A lot of us are familiar with the work of your partner and yourself in this field.
Last I heard, Asia is a continent. It’s a continent with many countries.
I think your irony meter needs adjustment.
Isn’t some of it a legacy of Cantonese vs Mandarin pronunciations? The former being more dominant in the past, but the latter more dominant now? I know that’s an oversimplification, but isn’t that part of what happened?
Thanks-- I’d never heard of “Pinyin.”
Damn, am I late to this thread. Already beaten to the punch that Asia is a “big country” (post 2) and “Wade” showed up right after.
To the OP, who decides is a good question. It depends. Started out generally by linguists from colonial powers, then the country came up with their own system, then eventually news services would adopt and it would become the de facto global system. At least, Mandarin Chinese pinyin system worked out this way. Pinyin didn’t become adopted by the news services like Reuters until the late 1970’s.
There were/are competing systems because several countries may speak the same language but will have different romanization systems. The Chinese diaspora across China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, etc use many different systems (one person’s Chinese family name could be spelled a half dozen different ways depending on what country. Ex. Luo, Lo Loh, Leoh, etc. Or Peking versus Beijing).
I’m not sure how say Bahasa Indonesia differs from Bahasa Malaysia?
Not really. Cantonese were the main seafarers/traders of old, and were the big wave of immigrants in the 1800’s and early 1900’s. So there were a lot of Cantonese words and phrases that influenced. So someone near a US Chinatown might know Kung Hey Fat Choy as “Happy New Year” but in pinyin it is “gongxifacai” and I won’t even pretend to try write it in Wade or Yale or the bastardized versions they used in Taiwan.
AFAIK, Mandarin was always the language that the widestream romanization systems were based on (Wade-Giles, Yale, pin yin, etc). There was quite the debate by the KMT after retreating to Taiwan whether or not to use Mandarin or Zhejiang-ese (Chekiang) as the official language of China as claimed by the Republic of China.
Even Taiwan these days has taken to a Taiwan variant of the standard pinyin use in China.
Chinese kids even use it on flash cards to learn their Chinese characters.
It probably doesn’t help that (so I’ve been told) the “official” transliterations have long been done rather sloppily all around. It’s not that they’re exactly bad, but they tend to be somebody’s preferred pronunciation rather than what it exactly common, gets changed randomly whenever convenient, and are not terribly consistent with either the various Chinese dialects or English pronunciations.
It also doesn’t help that there are sounds in Asian languages that simply don’t exist in English, so you have to make do with what there is.
For example, the Hindi letter ठ is often transliterated thusly:
ṭha or
/ʈʰ/
But unless you know exactly what sound that is, it won’t help you pronounce it correctly. Similarly, the Kannada letter ಳ is nearly impossible to represent in terms of standard English letters - the closest I can get is LLa, but that doesn’t do it justice at all.
In Korea, most vowel sounds don’t neatly correspond to a, e, i, o and u. And the consonant sounds–there’s a sound midway between b and p, one midway between g and k, one midway between r and l, one midway between d and t, one midway between j and ch. Gim and Kim are apparently the same family, and Gueongbuk and Kyungpook, the same province. The Latin alphabet is inadequate to the task of representing these sounds, and there’s only been sixty years of enough interaction between our cultures to warrant much transliteration, so it still isn’t standardized.
Indeed. This is particularly problematic in the old colonies of south China, which happen to be Cantonese-speaking, because transliteration systems had different European sources and changed frequently during their history.
In Macau (which is also correctly spelled Macao) the “W” sound in Cantonese was transliterated as a “V”. But it’s a “W” in Hong Kong. So someone with the surname 黃 will be Vong or Wong depending on which side of the Pearl River they’re standing.
Sometimes they’re just bad transliterations: Hoeng Gong (per the Jyutping* transliteration scheme for Cantonese) became Hong Kong. 恭喜發財 is usually transliterated as “kung hei fat choy” but is pronounced “gung hei faat coi” per Jyutping.
Sometimes they’re transliterations via a different language: Peking is now Beijing per pinyin. I often read that “Peking” was just a really shoddy transliteration of the Mandarin. However this is not true: it is actually a poor transliteration of a non-Mandarin dialect, probably Cantonese, in which 北京 is pronounced “Bak Ging”.
And sometimes they transliterations are just flat out wrong, perhaps from a single mishearing or a typo on a map or whatever: Mongkok in Kowloon is Wong Kok in Cantonese.
*Which itself isn’t even twenty years old and is confined to Hong Kong.
Not only do different European languages disagree on how a sequence of letters should be pronounced, but some Asian countries adopted a linguist’s phonetic transliteration independent of any particular language.
For example, the Thai island of Phuket is spelled so that a linguist would (correctly) assume “poo-ket” though an American might guess “fuck-it”. 
I came in to stress this point. English is just one of the languages that uses the Latin alphabet, and there’s no reason a Romanization of Chinese should be designed for English speakers over French or German or any other language. And it would be impossible to design a system that worked in all languages, or even all the major languages that use this alphabet. With pinyin, the sound transcribed as P is the same as English P, but the sound transcribed as B is the same as French P. They could just as easily have done it the other way around.
The McCune–Reischauer system is probably closest to what might be called a standard; it is the academically accepted standard anyway. The government’s official system is pretty much identical to this one, except they don’t use apostrophes or diacritics.
And when I was on Phi Phi (pron. “pee pee”) I met an American girl who did just that.
“I’ve just come over on a speedboat from Fuck-it,” she told us, so my amusingly cruel American friend engaged his fellow countryperson in conversation in order to get her to say it over and over again, while we all bit our tongues or pretended to be interested in something else.
“Where did you say you’d just come from?”
“Fuck-it.”
“Sorry, I didn’t catch that - where?”
“Fuck-it.”
“Where are you going back to later?”
“Fuck-it.”