The People’s Liberation Army is represented by 3 characters, which loosely translates as Liberate, Set Free, Military or Troops.
But it’s romanized as Jiefangjun – the three English words are represented as one Chinese word (spelled with three characters).
I don’t have a problem with the Chinese word being represented by 3 characters, or pronounced as the three characters – we do the same with ‘PLA’. But I’m curious about the translation between English and Mandarin. We have three words, 3 concepts, they have one word.
Is this because “PLA” has become a unitory concept in demotic Mandarin, or is it because of the way the language is constructed?
Why do you think it is one word? Renmin + jiefang + jun, 3 words
Perhaps you want to count “liberation-army” as one word, cf. German? There is a fine distinction here. Wiktionary even calls this “non-idiomatic”, i.e. not demotic, so it could be a buzzword, as it were. I think we have some posters who live in China who could comment.
I don’t live in China, but I grew up speaking Chinese. @DPRK is right: “Jiefangjun” is just a transliteration (an attempt to “convert” the written script of one language into another, i.e. a Romanization). Paging @China_Guy too to see if he has any input.
The actual characters are 解放军.
解放 = Jiefang = Liberation
军 = Jun = Army (or “soldier” in some contexts)
And “Renmin” is 人民 or populace/citizenry while 中国 is “China” or literally “Middle Kingdom”. Its proper full name is 中国人民解放军, i.e., the People’s Liberation Army of China.
It’s kinda like how Shanghai is actually 上海:
上 = Shang = up/above
海 = hai = ocean/sea
Japanese and Korean have similar constructs (in certain written forms of theirs that borrow from Chinese). But when transliterated into an Roman/Latin script for Western audiences, turning that one concept into a single word is just a convention that we (in the West) have.
Chinese characters are more information-dense than a singular character (or sometimes even a whole word) would be in an alphabetical script, so a 1:1 morpheme-for-morpheme transliteration isn’t always the best option for translation. The PLA as a concept is the entirety of Jiefangjun / 解放军, and breaking it down into individual characters will make it lose partial meaning. “放” by itself, for example, is just “put” / “release” / “let go” or similar, but together with the first character, it then becomes the compound 解放, i.e., liberation/to liberate. It’s not quite the same as the prefixes & suffixes we have in English, but similar in practice.
An example in reverse:
“Arnold Schwarzenegger” is 阿诺施瓦辛格 in Chinese.
“Ar-nold” is 阿-诺 and “Sch-war-zene-gger” is 施-瓦-辛-格. It doesn’t really mean anything (it’s just a transliterated name) and the resultant 阿诺施瓦辛格 isn’t six “words”, just a single name.
Edit: Oops, sorry… I guess in China proper, he would be 阿诺德 (Ar-nol-d) instead of 阿诺 (Ar-nold).
I thought the question being asked was “if you have a modified noun, do you normally have a space separating the pinyin or not?”
My thought (based on little or no knowledge of Chinese) is that something that is a proper noun in English will tend to have the pinyin written with no spaces.
That I’m not sure about, sorry. Maybe China Guy knows? I don’t know or use official Pinyin much.
The English Wikipedia’s section on spacing makes it sound like the spacing rules are more a political controversy than a hard and fast linguistic rule: Pinyin - Wikipedia
I think it’d make more sense to just group them by the unit of intended meaning rather than the properness of nouns?
Renmin (the people), for example, isn’t a proper noun, but it has no space. It’s a compound noun, but not a proper one.
This other example from Wikipedia:
Has a mix of proper placenames and “diliu” (number six) and “youeryuan” (kindergarten).
But apparently Chinese officials are trying to get people to spell out every single character? I don’t know how much that is actually followed or enforced.
For something like “mountain that is yellow”, you wouldn’t say “huang shan” (yellow mountain) anyway, but “huang se de shan” (mountain that is yellow), maybe prefixing it with “yizou” (a single unit of, conjugated for mountains). It’s not the spacing but the “participle” (if that is the correct term) that distinguishes them in colloquial usage. If you just pointed at a random yellowish hill and said “huang shan”, people would just look at you funny and tell you no, that’s not (the) Huangshan. It’d be like in English, if you were at some random river valley and remarked “grand canyon”, people would just assume you’re lost.
And sometimes it’s not even a different character or phrase. Tian, for example, can mean sky, day, or God depending on context, and it’s spelled exactly the same.
