Western spelling of Oriental names.
Mr. Spigot
It occured to me that in, say, Vietnam, they wouldn't be using Western
characters anyway (or am I wrong?), so someone over here has decided how to
spell such names. If so, why did they choose a scheme that is IMHO so
inaccurate?
Richard Kettlewell
There was a guy called Huy Nguyen at my school; at the start of one
year a new teacher looked up after reaching him in the register and
asked him if he was Welsh.
Lou Ravi
Well the job is pretty hard. I suppose the approach is to transliterate
the words as well as possible. But what is the way the Chinese pronounce
the name of their capital, is it Peking, as it used to be written, is it
Beijing as it is now written or is it A.N.Other? As well as that, how
does one pronounce the Bei in Beijing. As 'By' as in English and German
or as 'bay as in French?
@noway.com Mr. Spigot
news:4af453c0$0$955$ba4a...@news.orange.fr...
I'm probably over-simplifying a lot here, but Nguyen seems to me to be a
strange way of spelling something that sounds like Nyuwen.
@noway.com Mr. Spigot
news:87zl6z4...@araminta.anjou.terraraq.org.uk...
Beautiful. I can see how you could easily confuse the two :-)
Fleetie
"pinyin". Look it up on wikipedia.
"q" is like a "ch", but front-of-mouth, as in "chee" or something as an
English person would say the latter.
"x" is "sh" but also front, a BIT like the "sh" in "shee".
"zh" is like "dg" in "juDGe". Sort of. Ish.
etc.
Once you know the system and have practised the pronunciations, it's
very straightforward. The system works well for Mandarin/English.
Basically, there are rules, well-set-out, and easy to understand.
Martin
DeadMangledPigeon
"Mr. Spigot" <no...@noway.com> wrote in message
> Take a name like Nguyen or Qi - pronounced nothing like you would expect.
So HTF do you pronounce them?
Marcus Houlden
wrote the following to uk.misc:
>
> "Mr. Spigot" <no...@noway.com> wrote in message
>
>> Take a name like Nguyen or Qi - pronounced nothing like you would expect.
>
> So HTF do you pronounce them?
With good cheer.
mh.
--
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http://personal.nukesoft.co.uk
From address is a blackhole. Reply-to address is valid.
DeadMangledPigeon
"Marcus Houlden" <sp...@nukesoft.co.uk> wrote in message
>>> Take a name like Nguyen or Qi - pronounced nothing like you would
>>> expect.
>>
>> So HTF do you pronounce them?
>
> With good cheer.
They make tyres.
Fevric J. Glandules
Die, mofo, die.
And open up your killfile a bit, there's some cross-posted crap
that's not 100% crap.
Amethyst Deceiver
wrote:
>Take a name like Nguyen or Qi - pronounced nothing like you would expect.
Gosh, like so many western names.
>It occured to me that in, say, Vietnam, they wouldn't be using Western
>characters anyway (or am I wrong?), so someone over here has decided how to
>spell such names. If so, why did they choose a scheme that is IMHO so
>inaccurate?
Because how one Nguyen pronounces their name may be different from how
another does. Same as Indian placenames, say - What we've been calling
Bombay for a couple of hundred years we're now calling Mumbai because
that's a closer transliteration of the pronunciation.
For Chinese (and languages with similar scripts), Romanisation has
been underway for nearly 500 years and has been affected by both the
pronunciation of the language being spoken, and the language of
listener.
@noway.com Mr. Spigot
news:4af4b3c6$0$2526$da0f...@news.zen.co.uk...
>
> "Mr. Spigot" <no...@noway.com> wrote in message
>
>> Take a name like Nguyen or Qi - pronounced nothing like you would expect.
>
> So HTF do you pronounce them?
I believe it's something like Nyuwen and Chee.
Colonel Edmund J. Burke
I served in NAM, you fuckwit.
@noway.com Mr. Spigot
news:1ejbf5p3h9d7j45qo...@4ax.com...
> On Fri, 6 Nov 2009 15:35:08 -0000, "Mr. Spigot" <no...@noway.com>
> wrote:
>
>>Take a name like Nguyen or Qi - pronounced nothing like you would expect.
>
> Gosh, like so many western names.
I know, I know; but my assumption was that this type of spelling is the
English style, and I'd have thought we'd pick something more phonetic to
make it easier for us to get the names right. Thanks to the information
given by Fleetie, I know that this assumption was incorrect.
@noway.com Mr. Spigot
news:qPudnb9BX41TPGnX...@bt.com...
Excellent, thanks! Helps a lot.
Fleetie
> Fleetie wrote:
>
>> Once you know the system and have practised the pronunciations, it's
>> very straightforward. The system works well for Mandarin/English.
>> Basically, there are rules, well-set-out, and easy to understand.
>
> confident, you could try to expand the accuracy of it further, and start to
> introduce pronunciations that use the correct tone as well.
>
> http://mandarin.about.com/od/pronunciation/a/tones.htm
>
>
> - with this about tonal languages in general:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_%28linguistics%29
>
> - could start you off.
>
> A slight majority of languages are tonal, by the way.
>
I know about tones, but for example, you have posted as "Zhang DaWei".
How you I pronounce your name? You have not specified any tones.
All I can do is guess, or pronounce it all with a flat tone.
My last girlfriend was also a "Zhang", and it was tone 1, and I gather
it's quite a common family name, so I would guess that your "Zhang" is
"Zhang1", but it's only a guess.
As for "DaWei", I have no idea.
Martin
Miss Baltimore Crabs
>Archers are not /that/ uncommon- there's an Archers brewery in Wiltshire
>owned by the family of that name, and there is at least one Archer too
>many in Westminster.
There's a fucking load of them in Borsetshire.
--
Miss Baltimore Crabs