As I\u2019ve probably mentioned already, I\u2019m teaching myself Chinese at the moment.<\/p>\n
One thing that is annoying me greatly is that Chinese has no simple way of transliterating foreign names. Because of the writing system, Chinese has to use characters which are already used for existing words based on their phonetic likeness.<\/p>\n
Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, and Wikipedia have extensive tables to show which characters to use for transliterating foreign names (here\u2019s the table for English). For instance, \/m\u0251\u02d0\/, \/m\u00e6\/ and \/m\u028c\/ are all transliterated as \u9a6c, which is pronounced m\u01ce and means \u2018horse\u2019.<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s look at a concrete example at the consequences. \u201cCoca-Cola\u201d is called \u201c\u53ef\u53e3\u53ef\u4e50\u201d, which is pronounced k\u011bk\u01d2uk\u011bl\u00e8, and on their own the characters would mean \u201cavailable \u2013 mouth \u2013 available \u2013 music\u201d.<\/p>\n
Compare that to Japanese, which has a syllabary called katakana that is used mainly for transliterating foreign names; in katakana, Coca-Cola is \u30b3\u30ab\u30b3\u30fc\u30e9 (\u201ckokak\u014dra\u201d). I\u2019m sure the Chinese name has been chosen because of both the typographic simplicity and semantic attractiveness of the characters, but that\u2019s ludicrous!<\/p>\n
It would be so much better if Chinese were to adopt something similar to katakana. For instance, they could use bopomofo without tone marks and write \u310e\u3121\u310e\u311c\u310e\u3121\u310c\u311c (\u201ckoukekoule\u201d), which would accurately represent the pronunciation in Chinese while marking it as a foreign name.<\/p>\n
It would also have the added advantage of making foreign names stand out in a text. As an example, here\u2019s the first sentence from the Chinese Wikipedia\u2019s article on Libya:<\/p>\n
\u5229\u6bd4\u4e9a\u662f\u5317\u975e\u7684\u4e00\u4e2a\u56fd\u5bb6\uff0c\u4f4d\u4e8e\u5730\u4e2d\u6d77\u5357\u5cb8\uff0c\u4e0e\u57c3\u53ca\u3001\u82cf\u4e39\u3001\u4e4d\u5f97\u3001\u5c3c\u65e5\u5c14\u3001\u963f\u5c14\u53ca\u5229\u4e9a\u8ddf\u7a81\u5c3c\u65af\u76f8\u90bb\u3002<\/p>\n
Without reading and understanding the whole sentence, it\u2019s impossible to locate the names of the countries (which are all borrowings from English). Compare this to my bopomofoified version:<\/p>\n
\u310c\u4e00\u3105\u4e00\u4e00\u311a\u662f\u5317\u975e\u7684\u4e00\u4e2a\u56fd\u5bb6\uff0c\u4f4d\u4e8e\u5730\u4e2d\u6d77\u5357\u5cb8\uff0c\u4e0e\u311e\u3110\u4e00\u3001\u3119\u3128\u3109\u3122\u3001\u3113\u311a\u3109\u311c\u3001\u310b\u4e00\u3116\u3126\u3001\u311a\u3126\u3110\u4e00\u310c\u4e00\u4e00\u311a\u8ddf\u310a\u3128\u310b\u4e00\u3119\u76f8\u90bb\u3002<\/p>\n
It\u2019s much easier to parse, and you don\u2019t waste time wondering why \u4e9a \u2018Asia\u2019 is mentioned (it\u2019s there for its sound value).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I\u2019ve probably mentioned already, I\u2019m teaching myself Chinese at the moment. One thing that is annoying me greatly is that Chinese has no simple way of transliterating foreign names. Because of the writing system, Chinese has to use characters which are already used for existing words based on their phonetic likeness. Xinhua, the Chinese news agency, and Wikipedia have extensive tables to show which characters to use for transliterating foreign names (here\u2019s the table for English). For instance, \/m\u0251\u02d0\/, \/m\u00e6\/ and \/m\u028c\/ are all transliterated as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,117,154],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-linguistics","category-zh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13782,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4208\/revisions\/13782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}