I’ve noticed that when Chinese words are written out in English, many times the spellings are not even close to how they’re actually pronounced. I find this hard to understand, since the Chinese don’t use an alphabet, so it’s not a case of transferring letters of one alphabet (or their nearest equivalents) from one language to another; it seems to me that when the words are transliterated they must just try to spell them out phonetically. But they still screw it up. Example: everyone I’ve heard pronounces feng shui “fung shway”, so why the confusing English spelling? Another example: my girlfriend is Chinese (she speaks Cantonese) and the Americanized spelling of her last name is “Tang”, but the way her family actually pronounces it would more approximately be “Dahng”. I realize the same words in Chinese (both major dialects) can have different meanings depending on the tone used when speaking them, so maybe they try to use different English spellings to differentiate them, but you’d think you’d be able to gather what word was meant in context anyway (after all, English has many words that are spelled the same that mean different things). So why, if I’m correct in my assumption that the words are translated and spelled phonetically, aren’t they accurate? And if they don’t use phonetics, what is the criteria for figuring out how to spell these words? It seems pretty arbitrary and confusing to me.
The current-standard Pinyin transliteration system, and the previous Wade-Giles system (still used in Taiwan), both use the Roman alphabet, not the “English” one. English is just one of many languages that adapt the Roman alphabet to its own sounds. There’s no basis other than anglocentrism for your objections. Pinyin transliterations ARE phonetic, and completely consistent - just remember what sounds the letters really represent.
It’s fair enough, I suppose, to criticize Pinyin for not representing Cantonese sounds well enough, but remember that it’s based on Mandarin, which in spoken form is completely different.
Pinyin transliterations do have the great advantage over English of always being consistently, and therefore accurately, spelled. We anglophones have no right to criticize any other language for inconsistent spellings, right?
I dated a Chinese woman for a while, long enough to take a few classes in Chinese. I’ve forgotten most of it now (things ended rather unpleasently a while back) but one thing I do remember is that there were several differant methods of transliterating Chinese into English. (I seem to remember that “Pin-Yan” was the name of one method but there were several others.) (The woman I dated spoke Mandrian, which may make some differance.)
The thing I learned was that these methods were more involved with writing Chinese words out in English and not neccessarily trying to match the pronunciation. I suppose you’ve learned by now that Chinese is a “tonal” language. The same sound can have four different meanings depending on tone; falling, rising, falling then rising, and even. (Think of this as , /, /, and -).
The transliteration methods were designed to write Chinese out in English letters so as to avoid using Chinese characters. They were not intended to match pronunciation, which is why we get Peping, Peking and Bejing all referring to the same city. Different spellings come from different transliteration methods.
To expand on what ElvisL1ves says, it should be noted that Mandarin phonemes are not identical to English phonemes, and that English is also a rather poor choice to try to represent in the Roman alphabet (which was, after all, devised to represent Latin). At some point, therefore, it is necessary to say, “Well, this sounds kind of like the conventional (i.e., in my language) pronounciation of this letter, so, WTF, let’s go with it”.
Wade-Giles also accurately reproduces Mandarin sounds – you just have to “remember what sounds the letters really represent”. In fact, I’d say that Wade-Giles is more accurate than pinyin, at the cost of being almost unintelligible to the layman (pronounce a pinyin romanization as though it were English, and you’ll get a rough idea of the Mandarin word; most people wouldn’t have the thinnest notion of how to go about pronouncing a Wade-Giles romanization).
As if all the above didn’t represent enough of a difficulty, there’s another issue. I’ve been told that the system used to represent Chinese words in English was devised sort of as a code – the Roman letters don’t necessarily have the same values that a naive English speaker (like me) would assign to them. Thus "T’ " (T followed by a single quote) and "T " represent different sounds, the former being more like our “T” while the latter represented something more like “D”. This is why “wonton” is actually pronounced “wundun”.
I haven’t verified this explanation, but it makes sense – the same thing happened elsewhere in the world, usually when missionaries had to cope with a language full of unusual sounds and only had a standard set of Roman types in their printer kit. That’s why, I’m told, “Pago Pago” is pronounced “Pango Pango” – the missionaries decided that the “g” is always nasalized. THEY knew what they were talking about. It’s only when people simply copied these Romanizations later, with no knowledge of the code, and other people not “in the know” read them, that things got screwed up. Again, I’m told that the place names in upstate New York that don’t seem to make much sense (“Nunda” is pronounced “Nun - day”) got that way for the same reason.
This sort of thing is still going on. The most widely-used system of transcribing Japanese always assumes that “tu” is pronounced “tsu”. I’ve had to correct fellow workers on the pronunciation of “Mitutoyo”, a Japanese measuring instrument firm.
Well, sort of and not really. Grab a tall glass of something and have a seat.
In English, we basically have three kinds of stops – consonantal sounds where the air flow through the mouth is interrupted completely (or “stopped”). These three kinds are dental stops – /t/ and /d/, labial stops – /p/ and /b/ – and velar or gutteral stops – /k/ and /g/ (I’m enclosing the sound in vergules; letters I’ll enclose in double quotes, so that we can agree that “c” sometimes is pronounced /s/).
Now, how do we differentiate between /p/ and /b/ in English? Why, by voice – whether or not the vocal chords are brought into play when pronouncing a sound.
Note there is also a difference in aspiration – basically, the “puff of air” that ends a stop – in initial stops – unvoiced stops are aspirated, voiced stops aren’t. Medial stops aren’t aspirated, but that doesn’t matter, since voice differentiates, so we say that “pit” and “spy” contain the sound, while “bit” contains a different sound.
Now, in Mandarin, the differentiation (and, in Mandarin, all stops are considered initial) is made on the aspiration. An English speaker and a Mandarin speaker will agree that “pit” and “bit” (or “p’a” and “pa”) begin with different sounds. Force yourself to not aspirate the one, or aspirate the other, however, and they’ll disagree.
In Wade-Giles romanization, aspirated stops are followed by an apostrophe, unaspirated stops aren’t. Thus, “t” is properly pronounced /d/, “t’” is properly pronounced /t/. In pinyin, the respectively spellings are “d” and “t”.
(As a side note: go to Beijing (Peiching, Peking – you know, the capital of China 
) and you’ll hear people using voiced stops. A century and a half ago, it seems to have been different among the literati; look at the change from /i/ to /iy/ at the end of words, and the reduction of intervocalic /t/ to /’/, in English.)
This might have more to do with immigration. I believe my husband’s name is the same as your girlfriend’s. Some of his relatives spell it Tang,others spell it ****, and some even ended up with Ong.The reason I think it’s at least partially to do with immigration (where I’m sure they didn’t have foreign language experts to accurately spell or transliterate names) is because the same thing happened with my family (Italian and Austrian)
All of this explains quite clearly how Kong-Fu-Tse came to be pronounced Confucious… doesn’t it?
Before this grinds to a halt, I’d like some advice. I’ve been putting together a lame joke about going to make some Chinese medicine; “Zhinahn tonic.” The recipe is 3 ounces gin, 5 ounces tonic, and a generous hunk of lime over ice. What would be a realistic phonetic spelling for Zhinan?
Thank you for your patience.