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Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants? Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?
Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants? Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?
It seems this system is the Pinyin system common to mainland China, there are other transliteration systems used in Taiwan (Bopomofo) and Wade-Giles (which seems to create more phonetically obvious transliterations).
This link has a nice table in the symbology section. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
One thing that has puzzled me about complaints about English speakers' pronunciation of transliterated Chinese words (the only topic of TFA), is why the speaker is blamed rather than the transliteration. If the official transliteration into the Roman alphabet leads to less accuracy in pronunciation than some other (for example see the second vs third columns in the table in TFA), then would it not make better sense f…
Wade-Giles, an earlier system of transliterating Chinese, was designed more with English speakers in mind, but suffered from a number of problems of its own, particularly requiring apostrophes all over the place.
And in Japan you can still see two competing systems duking it out, with the Japanese-for-Japanese Kunrei system ("Huzi") officially anointed as standard but in practice the Japanese-for-Americans Hepburn ("Fuji") being far more common.
1. Vowels are like in Spanish ("a" always sounds "ah" etc.)
2. The group "ch" sounds like a "k" sound, e.g. bruschetta is "broos-keh-tah"
3. The groups "gl" and "gn" sound like Spanish "ll" and "ñ" respectively. Those are hard to pronounce for English speakers, the easy shortcut is just imagine that the "g" is silent and that the "l" or "n" are a bit more pronounced.
4. Double consonants need to have a much more pronounced sound, almost as if you pause for a moment on that consonant. It should be easy to tell apart "nonno" ("grandpa") and "nono" ("ninth")
One thing that has puzzled me about complaints about English speakers' pronunciation of transliterated Chinese words (the only topic of TFA), is why the speaker is blamed rather than the transliteration. If the official transliteration into the Roman alphabet leads to less accuracy in pronunciation than some other (for example see the second vs third columns in the table in TFA), then would it not make better sense f…
Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants? Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?
You can listen here:
https://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/transla...
https://dictionary.hantrainerpro.com/chinese-english/transla...
One thing that has puzzled me about complaints about English speakers' pronunciation of transliterated Chinese words (the only topic of TFA), is why the speaker is blamed rather than the transliteration. If the official transliteration into the Roman alphabet leads to less accuracy in pronunciation than some other (for example see the second vs third columns in the table in TFA), then would it not make better sense f…
A great idea, and useful not just for English speakers. My French background doesn’t make me any better at pronouncing Chinese names!
It would have, back when the sound currently written "r" was written "j" instead.
One thing that has puzzled me about complaints about English speakers' pronunciation of transliterated Chinese words (the only topic of TFA), is why the speaker is blamed rather than the transliteration. If the official transliteration into the Roman alphabet leads to less accuracy in pronunciation than some other (for example see the second vs third columns in the table in TFA), then would it not make better sense f…