I apologize for any confusion (though, now, I am a bit confused too: the Hmong word for ‘good’ is ‘zoo’, so I am not sure what to make of your translation?)
My point was, there are several ways to write the Hmong language, one popular system being the Romanized Popular Alphabet. It uses Latin characters, but that will not help anyone unfamiliar with the language to pronounce anything. They call themselves ‘hmoob’ : the “hm” is a voiceless bilabial nasal consonant; the doubling in “oo” makes it nasal, and “b” is not a consonant or a vowel at all, rather a high tone. There are some criticisms of this romanization system, but Hmong find it perfectly clear, just like Japanese reading “Nissan”.
The idea of there being “rules” of English spelling is a quaint one.
Plenty of people have come up with better ways to describe it. For example, you might say “The vowel in ‘bit’ as opposed to the vowel in ‘bite’.” Or “the [ɪ] vowel as opposed to the [aɪ] vowel.” (I use this – https://ipa.typeit.org/ – to type IPA characters. It’s easy.) Anyone wanting to discuss pronunciation in a written medium really should learn IPA.
English spelling was a mess long before that. Starting with the advent of publishing when spelling was standardized. Pronunciation is always going to change. Do you really want spelling to continuously keep up with every change?
“Peitcing” does both. “Beijing” fails to do anything for the Anglophone, except have everyone change from a perfectly valid Anglophone exonym (Peking) to something that will not produce correct pronunciation for anyone (Beijing).
I just tried again and now google is translating ‘hmoob’ to ‘English’! That’s pretty special, but at least it does have the correct translation as an option in the dropdown.
It is an actual transliteration of the same word into French (as far as I know), too bad for any other foreigners, including the English… I don’t know when this transliteration first appeared. The Hmong RPA (which yields the spelling “Hmoob”) was developed between 1951-3 by Christian missionaries.
There’s plenty of rules for spelling in English, far too many. Due to all the borrowing and failing to respell, they only apply to a certain subset of words, and that’s even before all the random exceptions.
Eg. "‘ch’ is pronounced as tʃ, unless the word is borrowed from French, in which case it’s ‘ʃ’, or unless it’s borrowed from Greek, in which case it’s like ‘k’, or unless it’s Scottish or German, in which case it’s ‘x’.
Simple!
There seems to be no way to describe those vowels as a group except ‘short’, though. And it’s pretty commonly taught to anyone learning English spelling.
A heck of a lot of words were borrowed from Norman and even Latin before spelling was standardised. I think whoever wrote the dictionaries was guilty for spelling words according to origin rather than sound, and deliberately spelling homonyms differently.
I wouldn’t want spelling changing all the time or for every little trend, but there’s been a lot of change in the language since Shakespeare’s time.
That’s a little surprising. I’m guessing a French speaker would be just as confused by a word starting ‘hm’ as an English speaker. And since ‘h’ is silent in French, what’s the point of including it in a transliteration at all?
It looks more like a parody of a rule to me than a rule.
Again, when we’re talking about pronunciation in a language that’s non-English, this concept is irrelevant.
Well, that’s the thing isn’t it? Why should we as speakers and users of the English language using English with each other give a flying fuck what the Chinese government thinks? Why are we adopting their schema, which was created for native speakers of Chinese? Let the Red Army do what it wants. We shouldn’t be taking their instructions on how to write in English.
A rule: “Now, before I begin the lesson, will those of you who are playing in the match this afternoon move your clothes down onto the lower peg immediately after lunch, before you write your letter home, if you’re not getting your hair cut, unless you’ve got a younger brother who is going out this weekend as the guest of another boy, in which case, collect his note before lunch, put it in your letter after you’ve had your hair cut, and make sure he moves your clothes down onto the lower peg for you.”
There’s a “t” sound in there? I thought Eivissa was more like “Eh-VEE-suh”. Wikipedia seems to confirm that with the IPA /əjˈvi.sə/. Pizza in English is /ˈpiːt.sə/.
You can find out what rules people use by giving them unknown or made up words to pronounce. Like how so many English speakers mispronounced ‘Hermione’ from the Harry Potter books in the same way.
If I was learning Japanese, then I’d do my best to speak it with the correct Japanese phonemes (and probably fail miserably). But if I’m saying a foreign word to another English speaker, I’m almost always going to use the closest English equivalent. Even more so if it’s a word that was borrowed into English long ago. No one cares if Germans object to our pronunciation of ‘uber’ or Hindi speakers think we’re saying ‘bungalow’ wrong.
Well, why are we adopting a schema that was created for native speakers of Japanese? Or French, for that matter? Why on earth are we using a different schema for words created by native English speakers from ancient Greek roots, a language that’s been dead for over 1000 years? The Irish language has spelling that’s pretty impenetrable for an English (or any other) speaker, how about creating a new system based on IPA so we know how to pronounce words like Taoiseach and Dáil?
So far as Irish political terms are concerned when writing in English we should generally be translating them rather than transliterating them, so it shouldn’t be a big issue.
The Japanese transliteration system is largely consistent with IPA with only minor complications such that I generally see it as compatible with English writing.
We already had adequate English transliterations of Chinese. If we need a new system we shouldn’t look to the Chinese government and adopt a system that’s less compatible with English or the IPA.
So it’s not that you object to respelling foreign words in general, you just prefer a system based on the IPA rather than English. But then why not do the same for other languages? If the Irish government wanted us to start using Cill Chainnigh instead of Kilkenny, would you oppose that, too?
I don’t even know why we switched from using Peking to Beijing, lots of other countries haven’t. It’s kinda strange that we changed names for Chinese, which isn’t even written in the Latin alphabet , but still use Naples instead of Napoli and Cologne instead of Köln.
I am afraid I do not know the origin of this transliteration; perhaps someone else does? I can only assume that the initial silent “h” is aspiré, not completely ignorable, and the spelling is therefore designed to help the French speaker approximate the proper pronunciation. Btw there is also (Green) Mong [note the spelling!], as opposed to (White) Hmong, and some consonants do vary between those two dialects.
Maybe Beijing vs Nanjing pronunciation? Also, if you change the romanization system, you can end up with stuff like Pei-ching.
