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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…
https://youtu.be/p1RKkRCiU90 Title: "having a non-white name" by ProZD
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you're interested in learning to pronounce non-English things, I highly recommend learning the IPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... You can get away from this vague stuff like 'an "ah" vowel', and learn (1) the real way the pronounce the names, including sounds that aren't in English, and (2) the precise closest English approximation, without having to go through analogies and metaph…
It annoys me when people use Github for blogging because that‘s what they‘re used to, especially if it‘s not the best medium. What do you think, are elaborate markdown tables the best way to show how to pronounce something, or… a wav file?
Something that always kind of bugs me is when I am traveling at an airport in the US, and there is an announcement like “Passengers X and Y, please come to gate 7” and the announcer obviously has no idea how to pronounce non-English names. This is even in airports like LAX which see a massive number of travelers from Latin America and East Asia. I would think that after making those sorts of announcements frequently…
> The basic ones I can think of that would increase accuracy measurably are: > 1. How to pronounce “Nguyen” You say that like there's only one way to do it.
Something that always kind of bugs me is when I am traveling at an airport in the US, and there is an announcement like “Passengers X and Y, please come to gate 7” and the announcer obviously has no idea how to pronounce non-English names. This is even in airports like LAX which see a massive number of travelers from Latin America and East Asia. I would think that after making those sorts of announcements frequently…
> The basic ones I can think of that would increase accuracy measurably are: > 1. How to pronounce “Nguyen” You say that like there's only one way to do it.
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…
In any case, my pet peeve is people expecting speakers of English to accommodate foreign sounds, but not extending the same ask to foreign speakers who often mangle English name sounds just as much.
I say just let them say it however they know how and let it be. I don't mind if they can't pronounce my name well.
But back to pinyin, that was intended as an alphabetic alternative for native Chinese speakers to use instead of logographs/characters. So it's audience wasn't foreign language speakers and thus will have shortcomings for them. This was back when they were tackling illiteracy and pinyin was seen as both potential replacement of characters or at least an aid in learning a simplified version of the original characters.
Question for someone knowledgeable - why doesn't Chinese transliteration make rational use of vowels and consonants? Why Q? Why not simply 'Ch'?
I am no expert, I asked the same question. 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