Not a native speaker, but at least in a Beijing accent, I wouldn't say that "Chen" rhymes with "fun." "Cheng" or "Zheng," or "Feng," sure, "fun" works as a comparison. "Chen," "Zhen," etc. would rhyme more with "pen" or "hen."
Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
51–60 of 474 posts
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#52Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants? Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?
In the older Wade-Giles system, they indeed tried to maintain some similarity with how English uses the Latin alphabet. Ch was used, for example Ssu-ma Ch'ien, which is now Sima Qian. Using Latin q for a ch sound isn't unheard of in European languages, for example, in Albanian. Mandarin pinyin is "rational" in the sense that any other language with phonemic values for the Latin alphabet widely divergent from Latin or English, like Turkish, Albanian, or Irish.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#53Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants? Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?
It does use almost all vowels and consonants. “Ching” ㄔㄧㄥ is a technically valid syllable in the Pinyin system but does not correspond to any word in the dictionary.
> “Ching” ㄔㄧㄥ is a technically valid syllable in the Pinyin system
No, it isn't; "ch" cannot be followed by a front vowel.
There are plenty of theoretically-valid but nonexistent syllables such as sěng or nǖ, but "ching" is not such a syllable.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#54One 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…
There are plenty of other transliteration systems that might lead to more accurate pronunciations for English speakers in particular (as opposed to say, native Russian speakers); see Wade-Giles or Gwoyeu Romatzyh. The factors that led to the current de-facto standard are more related to 20th century history rather than optimizing for the particular use case of reading aloud by non-natives.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#55Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants? Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?
As always, “rational” is subjective. Pinyin, the transliteration scheme in use in this post (in use in the PRC since the 50s or so), is necessarily full of trade-offs.
Ch is already needed to represent a sound which is much closer to the English “Ch”, as in Chen. But then there is this other sound, which sounds superficially like Ch to a non-native speaker, but actually is quite different (and if you mix them up, you might not be understood by a native speaker). What letter do you use for that?
Originally people used Ts, as in Tsingtao the beer, named for the city on the coast (but that wasn’t perfect either, because the sound also has very little in common with T). Then in the 50s Pinyin came along and it was changed to Q, so Qingdao (the final consonant was changed too).
Btw this change in transliteration schemes is why Peking Duck is still a thing: even though the city’s name is now spelled Beijing, the old spelling of Peking lives on in the name of the dish (and a few other places).
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#56One 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…
Of course.
But the "official" (as you say) transliterations of world languages enjoy wide usage not because they're necessarily the best anyone could come up with --- rather, they just represented the right local maxima at the right time in history.
Displacing those romanization systems with better ones (assuming those exist) would be an uphill battle lasting decades, and I wager there aren't many people who would find that struggle worth the effort.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#57A family friend had parents from New Zealand and Norway. He was born in New Zealand, and was named Brent after his grandfather.
As an adult he moved here to Norway, and immediately had an issue with his name. In Norwegian "brent" means burnt, and is pronounced almost exactly like "Brent".
So, he changed his name to a fairly common Norwegian name: Bernt.
Fast forward a couple of decades and he moves back to New Zealand and, as you can imagine, again finds himself in need of a name change since everyone is pronouncing his name as "burnt"...
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#58My name is "Sander". It's a common Dutch calling name, related to the (baptismal, in my case) name Alexander. I have always introduced myself in the US as "sender", which is easy and fine to me, but not how you pronounce it in Dutch, where the "a" is more like in the English "hard" (I suppose). I don't care. Until my mom visited, who started calling out everyone in my sphere for mispronouncing my name, despite my pleading to leave it alone... oh, well...
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#59One 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…
Pinyin was not designed as a system for making it easier for English speakers to pronounce Chinese, but as a way for native Chinese speakers to write their own language. During the early years of the revolution in China, there were proposals of various levels of seriousness to ditch characters entirely in favor of a Latin script like pinyin, and this actually happened in Vietnam. Wade-Giles, an earlier system of tran…
>Pinyin was not designed as a system for making it easier for English speakers to pronounce Chinese, but as a way for native Chinese speakers to write their own language.
In this case, it makes even less sense to blame English speakers for incorrect pronunciations resulting from this system.
Re: Pronouncing non-English names for English speakers
#60I'm not sure I agree that the best mapping of Pinyin "e" is to the English "u".
To my ears, Chinese "he" sounds closer to (non-American) English "her" than "huh".
Same for "chen" - "chun" captures neither the Chinese phonemes nor the English spelling. I'd argue even "Cheng" (hard e) is less likely to cause confusion/disrespect.