It seems like folks are always correcting my pronunciation of Chinese words that I’ve only read before.
“It’s not Tao, it’s Dow”
“It’s not Feng Shui, it’s Fung Shway”
“It’s not Chi, it’s Kee”
etc…
Granted these corrections are still only approximations of Chinese pronunciation, but the question remains.
Why weren’t these words spelled phonetically when they were translated into English in the first place?
Also, who decides how these words are spelled anyway?
Qi/Chi is pronounced ‘chi’ in Chinese. I think Kee is Japanese?
And here’s a reflection question for you - how come French terms aren’t spelled phonetically so you can get them right?
Chinese terms use phonetic systems that employ the ‘english’ alphabet, just as French does… you have to learn the rules of pronunciation to get either right. Plus, Chinese has phonemes for which there are no letters in English, and we don’t get to go inventing new letters to make up the difference, so they get close, and then trust you to learn the pronunciation rules (or get corrected until you get a feel for them).
There was a thread a while ago on Pinyin and Wade-Giles systems of spelling Chinese - my connection is too darn slow to find the thing, though! Maybe some kind soul will link it for me?
The Pin Yin system is what the Chinese use to represent Chinese sounds with Roman letters. Most of the sounds are similar to English, but there are many sounds in Chinese that simply don’t exist in English. On the whole, Pin Yin is a lot more consistant than English spelling. 
I reccomend taking an introductory Manderin course to learn how to pronounce Pin Yin words something close to correctly.
Most consonent sounds are easy. Telling the difference between ‘j’ and ‘zh’ is pretty hard for English speakers, but they’re close. ‘Z’ is pronounced as if there was a ‘t’ in front of it; try touching your tongue to the inside of your teeth right before making a usual Z sound. ‘S’ is similar. ‘ei’ is a long a sound as in “neighbor.” ‘Ou’ is a long o sound as in “go” or “flow.” ‘ie’ is more difficult, it’s sort of an “i-yeh” vowel sound, and so on.
Not a fair comparison, I think. The French alphabet varies only slightly from the English (both use the Roman). Pronunciation of vowels, etc., are different in each spoken language, but the alphabets’ differences are negligible–so there isn’t a good enough reason to force phoenetic spelling on it (or on English, for that matter!), and we just muddle along.
Chinese, on the other hand, had no alphabet whatsoever, and almost nothing in common with Indo-European languages in general. In theory, there is no reason why Chinese translated to English shouldn’t use phoenetic spelling. But there are a couple points:
- IIRC, the Europeans are the ones that approximated the spellings at first–and poorly–before native speakers went in and cleaned things up. Which is why you used to see “Mao Tse Tung” but, in recent years, have seen a big push to have it spelled “Mao Zedong.”
Is the Pin Yin system designed to translate into the Roman alphabet with an English pronunciation? Or is it some kind of international appoximation for the many languages that use the Roman alphabet?
I have to agree with toadspittle, French has it’s own spelling with the same alphabet, so we have much to gain from keeping the same spelling. It makes the genealogy of the word much easier to trace.
However, I was already aware that we don’t have the letters to completely pronounce Chinese phonetically. But this doesn’t stop people from insisting that Dow is a much closer appoximation that Tao. So why not spell it Dow?
Is Tao an older spelling poorly done by a foreigner?
Speaking of which, I recently watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon on DVD, and the characters repeatedly make reference to the city of Beijing. Except that in the subtitles, it’s always rendered as “Peking,” despite the fact that you can clearly hear “Beijing.” Didn’t we Westerners abandon the “Peking” spelling completely several years ago, and wouldn’t Ang Lee, with his Taiwanese roots, have known this?
There are multiple transliteration systems for Chinese, although the PRC has adopted pinyin as the “official” one. The older Wade-Giles system was designed in part by a Spanish-speaker, IIRC, and so some of the letters use Spanish rather than English pronunciations. (For example, ‘g’ sounds more like an ‘r’ to us).
Many of the phonemes of Chinese are hard to discern for English speakers. For instance, “Bejing” is pronounced with an unvoiced but also unaspirated ‘p’. (Think of the difference between “pot” and “spot” to hear the difference between an aspirated and unaspirated ‘p’). If you voice ‘p’, you get ‘b’. The unaspirated ‘p’ sounds a lot like a ‘b’ to English speakers, and pinyin has elected to use ‘b’ for this sound instead of the old ‘p’ of Wade-Giles (“Peking”). The ‘j’ is simply mispronounced by almost everyone - it’s supposed to sound more like a ‘g’, not the French ‘zh’ that everyone seems to use now.
Incidentally, “qi” sounds more like “kee” than “chi” to a Westerner, although neither is quite right.
:rolleyes:
Yeah, you’ve got to watch out for those damn furriners who don’t assume that the whole world speaks English when they’re setting up their transliteration systems.
I guess what you’re implying here is that Tao was translated by a non-english speaker, rather than someone who wasn’t well aquainted with the pronunciation.
So, if the Pin Yin system is the “official” one and it tries to account for an English use of the roman alphabet, then it seems that any English speaking person should be able to approximate (to the same degree that our alphabet can) the Chinese pronunciation from a Pin Yin spelling. Also,the spellings that are less intuitive, like Tao, were probably popular before the Pin Yin system so they managed to persist.
Well, I think pinyin was developed by persons whose first language was Chinese, although I’m sure some of them spoke English as well. As I mentioned, the Wade-Giles system was developed by a Spanish-speaker (although I erred in my example - it’s a ‘j’, not a ‘g’, that sounds like ‘r’ to us).
The eye-rolling was for the idea that pinyin is “supposed” to conform to English pronunciations. Why not French, or Spanish, or even Italian (after all, it is a “Roman” alphabet). In fact, why should the Chinese pick any single language at all? Why not use the pronunciations that are common to a bunch of languages when they make sense, and then map the “difficult” ones any way they want? This is basically what they’ve done with ‘q’ and ‘z’ in pinyin. The closest equivalent for a Westerner are ‘k’ and ‘ds’, but they wanted a single-letter representation, so they took some unusual letters that weren’t too far off and used them.
yeah, yeah, French was a bad example - I realized that after posting, but then I got stuck in a meeting, and well, now I’m back.
How about Russian? Or Greek? Not Roman alphabet, but you still need to know the rules of pronunciation to get them ‘right’.
Also, the Wade-Giles system does work VERY well, thanks, if you actually know how to use it! It is just confusing, because it is more linguistically based (things like aspiration marks!), which means it is often harder for non-Wade-Giles-literate people to figure out. (I also think that Wade-Giles was a pair of Englishmen, not Spaniards, but the use of the letters was more symbolic-based-on-linguistics theory, rather than 'relevant to English pronunciation… That’s what I recall from class, anyway, but that’s ages ago.) There were also some errors made in translation, plus some placenames that used a completely different system (postal-designation-Chinese, actually!), IIRC, but that isn’t the point. Both Wade-Giles and Pinyin work, but Pinyin is a better design for modern use.
(btw, and to MY ear, Qi sounds like a tight-mouthed ‘chi’, and nothing at all like “kee”… but then maybe my ear is tuned differently to Chinese than the ‘average’ Westerner after all that time spent there… the Western ‘k’ is aspirated, after all. Very different kind of sound.)
I don’t know if it’s still true, but when I lived in Taiwan 20-odd years ago, there were still a bunch of Wade-Giles holdouts.
WAG:
Perhaps Lee is just old-fashioned.
Peking isn’t Wade-Giles, it is postal standard spelling. I think the W-G spelling is Pe-ching, which is actually pretty accurate for pronunciation.
And yeah, old habits die hard. One of my Chinese History profs had a real hard time leaving Wade-Giles (AND the postal code spellings) behind. Plus, IIRC, there’s kind of an anti-pinyin feeling among many of the Taiwan old guard, because that was a COMMUNIST spelling system. My first Chinese teacher was adamant about not using Pinyin for anything, because it was COMMUNIST (can you guess where she hailed from?). We used instead a funky but useful symbol-set that did not employ Roman letters at all. One symbol for each of the phonemes, too, so they were a heck of a lot more accurate, as long as you could remember what the specific symbol sounded like. Then, of course, I took a college course, and it was back to Pinyin, no questions asked… (guess where THAT teacher was from?)…
The adoption of Pinyin by the West was rather a slap in the face for Taiwan, actually.
Maybe it was just that they used a Spanish ‘j’. I presume you agree that the Wade-Giles ‘j’ sounds like an ‘r’ to Western ears?
The chi/kee difference is a good example of how difficult it can be to create any romanization system for Chinese. Different Westerners hear that same sound differently, depending on their linguistic backgrounds, and maybe even on their hearing. Not to mention the diversity of pronunciations within China. I learned what Chinese I know from someone who originally learned to talk in Hong Kong, came to America at age 4, and went to high school in Taipei. His mother is from Canton and spoke both Cantonese and Mandarin with him when he was growing up. The way he and his mother say it, it sounds like “kee” to me, but there’s a lot of room for error in there. And don’t even get me started on ‘sz’.
(In preview, I see that you think the actual pronunciation of Northern Capital sounds more like Pe-ching than Peking, which reinforces my view that we just hear these things differently. Incidentally, you can really confuse waitresses at the California Pizza Kitchen by pronouncing it correctly when you order the Peking Duck Pizza.:))
(a) AFAIK, Pinyin was adopted as an official transcription scheme by the PRC government during the Mao regime – the Taiwanese never had any reason to adopt it.
(b) It was created as a romanization scheme specifically for Mandarin but not specifically to achieve an “English” pronunciation equivalence.
©Opal is spelled phonetically.
(d)And anyway if I were looking for a phonetic transcription, English (and French) would not be at the top of my list to emulate. I’d look for a language as close as possible to representing one and exactly one sound by each written character anywhere it appears.
(e) Maybe it’s me, but the back-of-the-palate phoneme often heard in Hebrew and Arabic, a.k.a a Spanish “j”, does not sound to me at all like an English “r”.
The main misunderstanding here seems to be the assumption that Pin Yin is based on English spelling. It’s not. It was invented by the Chinese for two purposes: Teaching native Chinese how to read early on without having to learn very many Chinese characters, and making it easier for foreigners to learn Chinese. The Pin Yin pronounciations are not based on any one language, though they attempt to approximate the phonetic sounds common in many Western languages which use the Latin alphabet.
I’m not very familiar with many Greek words. I think I might know a few food words, but they might be just generally Mediterranean. Maybe you’ve provided a good counter example there.
I’ve been exposed to a few Russian words. Moscow seems easy enough. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation of Boris Yeltsin. Vodka, I’m told, sounds more like wodka, but I’m under the impression that we english speakers are pretty isolated in using the v sound. Also, Cyrillic actually seems to have some letters in common, so a complete phonetic translation may not make the most sense. Of course, I don’t expect to sound like a Russian when I say “Moscow”, but it seems to be the close enough that no one has ever corrected me.
With Chinese words on the other hand, people seem quite adamant about approximating the Chinese pronunciation even if they don’t speak the language. When I asked these people, “why isn’t it spelled Dow?” they just shrugged.
I guess I’ve come across as the ignorant American, expecting the world to bend over backwards to suit me. I did think there was a rational explanation though, just didn’t know what it was. I was under the impression that the British had quite a good deal of contact with China, so why wouldn’t they make their own translations? And if they did, as hedra seems to recall, why wouldn’t it be more intuitive?
The idea that the Chinese made the translation themselves for their own purposes with an eye towards international use makes perfect sense though. Just never occurred to me.
Okay, maybe this reiteration will be easier to understand.
Pinyin is the official romanization used by the People’s Republic of China. It was adopted IIRC in the 1970’s. What throws people off about pinyin is that it is not pronounced like English in all cases. Pinyin is a symbol for a Mandarin sound, and you have to shape your mouth and position your tounge correctly for it to work. Pinyin has no indicators for aspiration or other pronounciation tools. You simply have to memorize how the letter should actually be pronounced.
Wade-Giles was developed by linguists, and makes sense to a linguist. It uses apostrophe’s as an aspiration indicator. For Example, Peking (really should be Peiking) has no aspiration marks so the P is really pronounced as a B, and the K is really pronounced as a J. Hence under pinyin it is romanized as Beijing.
Taiwan is loosely based on the Wade-Giles system, but they dropped the apostrophe, thus making it a really confusing system.
Taiwan uses the Zhuyinfuhao or bopomofo system to teach school kids. It’s a lot like the japanese hiragana or katakana system. It uses symbols rather than letters to stand for a sound/pronunciation. Only the Taiwanese use this system.
In the PC age, INMO any form of romanization seems superior. I’ve always used the pinyin and after about the first month of studying Chinese, it always made sense. For using Chinese word processors, I think the pinyin is really superior.
Just to repeat once again, once you understand that pinyin is not pronounced like English all the time, it will probably make a lot more sense.
Does Hong Kong Chinese use a different system as well? I just know that when I worked in US immigration law, we learned fairly easily to recognize whether a client was from the PRC, Taiwan or Hong Kong just by the anglicized spelling of their name - though I couldn’t tell you how we recognized it.
In HK, they speak the Cantonese dialect, so the romanization system is completely different. Cantonese also has some pretty difficult pronunciations, so it gets wierd. Again, like pinyin, it’s better if you think of the romanization as a guide rather than trying to pronounce how it’s spelled in English.
Singapore uses pinyin IIRC. But names in singapore are pretty well neigh impossible to figure out. A lot of the names are someone’s personal romanization of pretty obsure Chinese dialects.