# Why the odd spelling of many asian names? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 15, 2012, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129 "2012-11-15T21:02:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Frylock](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/ce7236/32.png) [@Frylock](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Frylock)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2012, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/61 "2012-11-20T21:16:36Z")
> [@dstarfire](#): > > Translator: What’s your name? and how do you spell it? > International Traveler: says name and spells in native, non-latin alphabet > Translator: okay, here’s how it’d be spelled in (official language of whatever country the person is trying to enter). But it’s impossible to do that, because different languages use different sounds. There’s no such thing, at least in general, as “how you would spell this word from language X using the orthography of language Y” because the word from language X is likely to contain sounds for which there is no orthographical representation in language Y. ---
**Author:** ![Normal\_Phase](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Normal\_Phase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Normal_Phase)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2012, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/62 "2012-11-20T21:33:44Z")
> [@dstarfire](#): > > I understand that languages use different sounds and spellings, which means weird-looking names are inevitable. > > My point was that when there’s no common alphabet to carry that baggage, why aren’t names so spelled as they sound, using the spelling rules of the language they’re translated into? As others have implied, for Chinese at least, it’s because the people who speak the language itself (talking of Mandarin here) wanted a system of romanization, and they naturally wanted to use one that worked well for themselves. The letters that most often confuse English speakers are X (which sounds sort of like English “sh”), “Q” (which sounds sort of like “ch”), and “ZH” (which sounds sort of like “j”). Pinyin can’t just use sh/ch/j instead because there are already _other_ sounds in the language that also sound similar to those English sounds, and so those letters/letter combinations are already in use. To suggest that Chinese people should just give up and combine them is as silly as suggesting that English should not use different letters for B and V because Spanish speakers don’t generally distinguish them. (Not to mention the Chinese language has enough redundancy already without adding more. X/SH, Q/CH and J/ZH aren’t only subtly different in sound, they also influence the pronunciation of the vowels that follow them. So for example, the “yes” that sounds like “sure” to the previous poster – that’s “shi” in pinyin, but “xi” would be pronounced more like “she”. Same with the other pairs.) My high-school learnings, let me share them. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Normal\_Phase](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Normal\_Phase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Normal_Phase)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2012, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/63 "2012-11-20T21:40:54Z")
> [@Frylock](#): > > But it’s impossible to do that, because different languages use different sounds. There’s no such thing, at least in general, as “how you would spell this word from language X using the orthography of language Y” because the word from language X is likely to contain sounds for which there is no orthographical representation in language Y. Yeah, and as someone who has been ever-so-slowly picking up some Tamil over the last several years, at the hands of a husband who is excruciatingly picky about pronunciation – let me tell you that the Translator in that story is quite likely not even to hear the name as it is actually pronounced, much less be able to reproduce it accurately in his own language’s orthography. I can still not reliably distinguish Tamil’s several forms of the (english) letter “N”, no matter how slowly someone speaks to me. And I’m not at all bad with languages. ---
**Author:** ![dstarfire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dstarfire/32/5762_2.png) [@dstarfire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dstarfire)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2012, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/64 "2012-11-20T22:24:18Z")
> [@Normal\_Phase](#): > > … as silly as suggesting that English should not use different letters for B and V because Spanish speakers don’t generally distinguish them. :smack: That’s exactly what I would expect to happen if English and Spanish used different alphabets. Then again, I can certainly understand people being somewhat stubborn about the pronunciation (and hence spelling) of their names. I imagine I’d be just as annoyed if a chinese gentleman changed the l’s in my name to r’s. Oh well, as long as we can keep bastardizing their food and philosophies … 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Mister\_Rik](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mister_rik/32/491_2.png) [@Mister\_Rik](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mister_Rik)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2012, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/65 "2012-11-20T23:05:28Z")
> [@Frylock](#): > > But it’s impossible to do that, because different languages use different sounds. There’s no such thing, at least in general, as “how you would spell this word from language X using the orthography of language Y” because the word from language X is likely to contain sounds for which there is no orthographical representation in language Y. My own first name, Rik, becomes “Rikku” ( リック ) in Japanese (according to the native Japanese speaker I asked) because there’s (apparently) no way in Japanese to represent a hard “K” sound at the end of a word, and it would be awkward for a Japanese speaker to pronounce. Likewise, my last name, Osborne. Japanese can’t accurately “spell” either the “sb/zb” sound or the “rn” sound, so it becomes “Ozubo–n” ( オズボ−ン ). ---
**Author:** ![jovan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/0ea827/32.png) [@jovan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jovan)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2012, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/66 "2012-11-20T23:24:09Z")
> [@dstarfire](#): > > I imagine I’d be just as annoyed if a chinese gentleman changed the l’s in my name to r’s. Welcome to my life. Anyway the system you suggested is pretty much what happened in the US 100 years ago. Let me tell you, it makes tracing genealogies terribly difficult. I have ancestors that have their names written 4 or 5 completely different ways, none of which bear much resemblance to the original French pronunciation. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2012, 4:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/67 "2012-11-21T04:59:13Z")
> [@dstarfire](#): > > So, tangents and emotion-only responses aside, it seems the answer to my original question is “because those are the closest approximations possible with the spelling rules of (whatever language first transliterated the name into latin characters)”, correct? INcorrect. It’s correct once you take out that “first”; part of the problem is that there are many transliterations, and that often they are used by people whose spelling systems are not the spelling systems used by whomever performed the transliteration - note that this can be true not only when the speaker and the transliteratior have different languages, but also when they have different English dialects (see all those threads about “how do you pronounce…”). [Old post](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=13446376&postcount=44) of mine on the subject of mixed-spelling (in the example, mixed language) transliterations. Note that where it says “Spanish languages” it should say “Spanish dialects”. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2012, 6:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/68 "2012-11-21T06:15:02Z")
> [@Normal\_Phase](#): > > Yeah, and as someone who has been ever-so-slowly picking up some Tamil over the last several years, at the hands of a husband who is excruciatingly picky about pronunciation – let me tell you that the Translator in that story is quite likely not even to hear the name as it is actually pronounced, much less be able to reproduce it accurately in his own language’s orthography. I can still not reliably distinguish Tamil’s several forms of the (english) letter “N”, no matter how slowly someone speaks to me. And I’m not at all bad with languages. > [@Normal\_Phase](#): > > I can still not reliably distinguish Tamil’s several forms of the (english) letter “N”, no matter how slowly someone speaks to me. And I’m not at all bad with languages. Do you mean ங் ṅ, ஞ் ñ, ண் ṇ, ந் n, or ன் n? 😉 ---
**Author:** ![twopiecesofeight](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/5e9695/32.png) [@twopiecesofeight](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/twopiecesofeight)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2012, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/69 "2012-11-21T17:16:55Z")
Below is an interview with the popular co-host/MC of the “Paris By Night” series, Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn. The interviewer pronounces Nguyễn’s name during his introduction at the 40-second mark: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg2-Pq9pj3I&t=38s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg2-Pq9pj3I&t=38s) With a pronunciation like that, any spelling using Romanized letters would be tricky. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![dstarfire](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dstarfire/32/5762_2.png) [@dstarfire](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dstarfire)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2012, 5:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/70 "2012-11-21T17:52:44Z")
> [@Mister\_Rik](#): > > My own first name, Rik, becomes “Rikku” ( リック ) in Japanese (according to the native Japanese speaker I asked) because there’s (apparently) no way in Japanese to represent a hard “K” sound at the end of a word, and it would be awkward for a Japanese speaker to pronounce. Likewise, my last name, Osborne. Japanese can’t accurately “spell” either the “sb/zb” sound or the “rn” sound, so it becomes “Ozubo–n” ( オズボ−ン ). That would explain the “you looka like a boobie doll” line I heard in an anime. I still derive a good bit of amusement at the thought of trying to explain the difference between a barbie doll and a boobie doll (if there were such a thing). ---
**Author:** ![solosam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9d8465/32.png) [@solosam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solosam)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2012, 6:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/71 "2012-11-21T18:43:14Z")
Also, keep in mind that Asian immigration to America started in the middle of the 19th century. Imagine being a Chinese person getting off the boat in San Francisco. Some strange white person asks for your name, writes down the simplest spelling of whatever he thinks he heard, and voila! Now you have your American name. I was in college one time, and the professor was trying to explain why Wade-Giles and Pinyin were both deficient in one way or another. Eventually someone just asked why people didn’t write things phoenetically. The professor got all bug eyed and panicky at the thought that there would not be a system for transliteration (however inadequate). Apparently the idea of just writing something the way it sounds broke something in her brain. ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2012, 7:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/72 "2012-11-21T19:30:45Z")
> [@twopiecesofeight](#): > > Below is an interview with the popular co-host/MC of the “Paris By Night” series, Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn. The interviewer pronounces Nguyễn’s name during his introduction at the 40-second mark: > > [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg2-Pq9pj3I&t=38s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg2-Pq9pj3I&t=38s) > > With a pronunciation like that, any spelling using Romanized letters would be tricky. 🙂 You do realize, do you not that “Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn” is actually spelled using “Romanized letters” and it’s not a bit tricky in the least? > [@solosam](#): > > Eventually someone just asked why people didn’t write things phoenetically. The professor got all bug eyed and panicky at the thought that there would not be a system for transliteration (however inadequate). Apparently the idea of just writing something the way it sounds broke something in her brain. “Write something phonetically” or “the way it sounds” has no really objective meaning when your “phonetic writing” has more than one way to (a) write the same sound and (b) say the same combination of letters. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2012, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/73 "2012-11-21T21:21:31Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > You do realize, do you not that “Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn” is actually spelled using “Romanized letters” and it’s not a bit tricky in the least? And if you were to dumb it down for lazy Americans, as the OP is requesting, how different could you spell it anyway? You could respell Nguyễn as “Ngwien,” which may be marginally more intuitive for English speakers, but that’s about it. What would it accomplish? You couldn’t give the lazy Americans much of a clue about pronunciation anyway, and it would only piss off the Asians to deliberately misspell their names. I wonder if the OP really has any idea at all of what he’s asking for. ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [November 21, 2012, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/74 "2012-11-21T21:42:06Z")
> [@Monty](#): > > You do realize, do you not that “Nguyễn Ngọc Ngạn” is actually spelled using “Romanized letters” and it’s not a bit tricky in the least? > > “Write something phonetically” or “the way it sounds” has no really objective meaning when your “phonetic writing” has more than one way to (a) write the same sound and (b) say the same combination of letters. And that’s a good point that’s not apparently being “gotten” by some participants here. Orthography (how to spell a sound, and correspondingly how to pronounce a spelling) is a convention specific to a specific language. English DOES NOT hold any special title to pronouncing certain combinations of Latin glyphs. (Hell, if someone wants to claim precedence the Romans should, since it’s their glyphs. They would then be quite justified in asking why we mispronounce “V” like “vee” when plainly the correct pronounciation is “wee”.) If you want to see a puzzing orthographic system for a European language that uses Latin glyphs, try Irish. I love Celtic music, and have listened to it for years, but I’ll be damned if I can reliably draw a correlation between what I hear and what the lyrics sheet says. But that doesn’t mean they’re spellling it “wrong”. They’re spelling it correctly, for Irish. Just because it’s ALMOST like English, except where it’s not… it’s not wrong. Or even odd. Just different. ---
**Author:** ![Panurge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@Panurge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Panurge)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2012, 11:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/75 "2012-11-22T11:42:36Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#): > > Are there any major languages which use the western alphabet who pronounce x as sh? English, french, german, danish, dutch, spanish, no. Why x for sh then? > [@TriPolar](#): > > It’s common in India. A name once spelled Lakshmi or Laksmi may now be spelled Laxmi. Confused the hell out of me 30 years ago. I got used to it. Laxmi isn’t pronounced Lashmi. It is pronounced Lakshmi (with a retroflex s: ṣ). And the spelling might not be so odd considering that the “kṣ”-cluster has a specific letter (that deviates somewhat from construction principles of the “regular” “k+[something]”-cluster letters. Using an “X” here actually seem quite fitting. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2012, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/76 "2012-11-23T03:58:57Z")
> [@Panurge](#): > > Laxmi isn’t pronounced Lashmi. 😕 Nobody said it is. > [@](#): > > It is pronounced Lakshmi (with a retroflex s: ṣ). And the spelling might not be so odd considering that the “kṣ”-cluster has a specific letter Not a letter, a conjunct consonant that combines 2 letters. Written with a single glyph for the two, along the lines of the ampersand & which is also a sequence of 2 letters (e and t) smooshed together. > [@](#): > > (that deviates somewhat from construction principles of the “regular” “k+[something]”-cluster letters. Using an “X” here actually seem quite fitting. Fine. But then Hindi and its Indo-Aryan relatives would be the only languages in the world who use the letter x to mean that sequence of 2 consonants. In Tamil, which belongs to a different language family called Dravidian, the name is pronounced Latchmi, and they romanize it as Latchmi. Since x is usually one of the leftover letters, like c and q, it gets appropriated to stand for all sorts of different sounds in various languages around the world. But I’m used to thinking of it by default standing for the voiceless velar fricative, unless stated otherwise. By its deviance I get what you mean that it isn’t obvious how when you smoosh together क् and ष, you get क्ष. Granted. That one is far from intuitive. But it isn’t the only unintuitive conjunct consonant in Devanagari. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2012, 4:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/77 "2012-11-23T04:06:05Z")
Also, in medieval Hindi, Lakṣmi came to be pronounced Lakhmi, thus the name of Delibes’s opera _Lakmé_. Just as _Upaniṣad_ became “_Oupnek’hat_.” The Sanskritic form of the names has since been re-established as the standard in Modern Hindi. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2012, 7:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/78 "2012-11-23T07:06:48Z")
> [@dstarfire](#): > > :smack: That’s exactly what I would expect to happen if English and Spanish used different alphabets. > > Then again, I can certainly understand people being somewhat stubborn about the pronunciation (and hence spelling) of their names. I imagine I’d be just as annoyed if a chinese gentleman changed the l’s in my name to r’s. > > Oh well, as long as we can keep bastardizing their food and philosophies … 😉 Pinyin isn’t about you. It’s used in China as a guide to help children learn to read, to make signs for foreigners, to facilitate typing, and as a part of the now abandon dream of moving away from the ridiculously hard to learn character system. The needs of non-Chinese speakers outsider of China are at best a secondary concern. ---
**Author:** ![Panurge](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/fbc32d/32.png) [@Panurge](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Panurge)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2012, 9:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/79 "2012-11-23T09:19:37Z")
> [@Johanna](#): > > 😕 Nobody said it is. > > Not a letter, a conjunct consonant that combines 2 letters. Written with a single glyph for the two, along the lines of the ampersand & which is also a sequence of 2 letters (e and t) smooshed together. > > Fine. But then Hindi and its Indo-Aryan relatives would be the only languages in the world who use the letter x to mean that sequence of 2 consonants. In Tamil, which belongs to a different language family called Dravidian, the name is pronounced Latchmi, and they romanize it as Latchmi. > > Since x is usually one of the leftover letters, like c and q, it gets appropriated to stand for all sorts of different sounds in various languages around the world. But I’m used to thinking of it by default standing for the voiceless velar fricative, unless stated otherwise. > > By its deviance I get what you mean that it isn’t obvious how when you smoosh together क् and ष, you get क्ष. Granted. That one is far from intuitive. But it isn’t the only unintuitive conjunct consonant in Devanagari. Re: the 😕 above: The two posts I quoted are placed as question and answer above. I read is as if SciFiSam asked: “Why no x for sh, then?” - and TriPolar answering “It’s common in India”, providing Laxmi as an example. I might have been mistaken here. And to your second point: I am aware that there aren’t any linguistic or paleographical link between “ksh” and “X”. I just liked the fact that a particular (yes, one among many weird conjunct consonants) conjunct consonant in devanagari has found (a) representation in a single roman letter. ---
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2012, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129/80 "2012-11-23T12:00:51Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Pinyin isn’t about you. It’s used in China as a guide to help children learn to read, to make signs for foreigners, to facilitate typing, and as a part of the now abandon dream of moving away from the ridiculously hard to learn character system. > > The needs of non-Chinese speakers outsider of China are at best a secondary concern. Which are all arguments for English speakers using English to disregard Pinyin spellings when transliterating Chinese words. We should be spelling it as Peiching, not Beijing. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-the-odd-spelling-of-many-asian-names/641129.md?page=5)