8 ms·

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

by prvc 5y ago

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 for the aggrieved name-holders to adopt a more accurate transliteration instead? Could it be that the transliteration rules which are now standard are not optimally suited to this purpose?

Clewza313 5y ago
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 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.
- prvc 5y ago
  >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.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Kunrei Shiki is really annoying. Nobody knows how to pronounce Mitutoyo correctly because someone in Japan got scared of the supposed ambiguity caused by "tsu".
  - kragen 5y ago
    I recently saw some publicity video by Mitutoyo America on YouTube that pronounced it [mitutɔjou]. All the machinists I watch on YouTube pronounce it [mɪtsutɔjou] though.
sverhagen 5y ago
I find the title misleading, as the link is only covering Chinese. But the same problem exists with other languages that are already using the "Roman alphabet". So, with that in mind, what makes you think the transliteration should be optimized for English? :)
- tasogare 5y ago
  Yeah, I was kind of blueballed by the page. Maybe the author expected pull requests for other languages?
Epenthesis 5y ago
The goal of pinyin was not to make Mandarin words pronounceable to English speakers, but to be a consistent means of representing the sounds of Mandarin to Mandarin speakers.
phreack 5y ago
Maybe it's transliterated for a more Latin-like crowd where vowels have exactly one pronunciation, like in languages like Spanish, where reading the second columns as they'd naturally think to, would likely be 95% OK
bdon 5y ago
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.
caseyross 5y ago
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.
- usrusr 5y ago
  Particularly when the dominant language that uses roman letters is lacking a consistent alphabetic encoding system itself. Before you start replacing pinyin, you might want to take a long, critical look at how English is written.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mc32 5y ago
Pinyin is pretty close. At least it's predictable. Wade-Giles is way off -well, I guess it was based off Cantonese? 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.
- prvc 5y ago
  >But back to pinyin, that was intended as an alphabetic alternative for native Chinese speakers to use instead of pictogram/characters. So it's audience wasn't foreign language speakers and thus will have shortcomings for them. Yes that makes sense, and is reasonable. But the expectation for all foreigners to be familiar with it is not.
  - dirkt 5y ago
    But I'd say the expectation that professionals who have to pronounce Chinese names pretty frequently, like those who do announcements at an airport, or newscasters, could spend the time to familiarize themselves with it IS reasonable.
    - carlmr 5y ago
      I agree, it's crazy how often the news talk about China nowadays and almost nobody pronounces the names correctly.
      - mc32 5y ago
        It’s not a big deal. Watch some news in Chinese and you’ll hear similar butchering. It’s so exaggerated US cities are given totally different names in Chinese -there is little resemblance to the North American name of the city.
cabalamat 5y ago
> 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 to adopt a more accurate transliteration instead? Can't be done. The Roman alphabet is a pretty good alphabet for Latin, but it isn't for Chinese, which has different sounds than are in Latin (or English). For example, stop consonants in English have a voiced-unvoiced distinction: /p b t d k g/ Latin is similar: /p b t d k g kw gw/ Chinese is totally different. Instead of a voiced-unvoiced distinction, it has aspirated-unaspirated: /p ph t th k kh/ (with the h denoting an aspirated stop).
- akersten 5y ago
  Is there a resource (maybe with sound samples) that expands on the voiced/unvoiced vs aspirated/unaspirated distinction? It sounds fascinating, but I'm struggling to conceptualize it just with the text here.
  - ylyn 5y ago
    Compare the t in 'stellar' vs the t in 'tell'.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      What's the difference between the t in 'stellar' vs the t in 'tell'? I seem to pronounce them identically, dictionary pronunciation guides (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/stellar?q=stellar https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... and https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/tell?q=tell https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...) do not make a distinction.. [edit] ah, one (!) of the two "tell" audio recordings in that dictionary seems to pronounce it in a different way that would illustrate the aspiration, but that seems different to how I've usually heard 'tell' being pronounced.
      - bjowen 5y ago
tdeck 5y ago
I wondered this too when learning Pinyin. I believe the reason is that while Pinyin's X and Q may sound like "sh" and "ch" to English speakers, they are actually different sounds (and contrast with the "sh" and "ch" sounds that also exist in Mandarin). That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei", "shi" is pronounced "shr", "-ian" is pronounced "yen", etc... MPS-II seems much closer to intuitive pronunciation for English speakers, although it never caught on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Phonetic_Symbols_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Phonetic_Symbols_II
- loycombinate 5y ago
  A Chinese teacher once told me that pinyin is based off Russian
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    That's more wrong than correct. There's only one minor part of the design where we can see a relation: Latin q resembles Cyrillic ч.
- Markoff 5y ago
  > That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei", "shi" is pronounced "shr" Shi is pronounced Shr? That sounds more like your typical pirate Beijing hua. Which can get quite confusing when you get out of Beijing to let's say to Shanghai business trip and you can't figure if something cost 4 or 10 kuai at street vendor (my personal anecdote, I think they actually do it on purpose since normally 4 would have very different sound).
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  > I believe the reason is that while Pinyin's X and Q may sound like "sh" and "ch" to English speakers, they are actually different sounds (and contrast with the "sh" and "ch" sounds that also exist in Mandarin). Neither Mandarin sh nor x exist in English. X is sharper and is a little more like shy-, whereas sh is darker and a little like shr-. In reality they both strike English speakers as being quite like sh, because we use the space differently. I've heard various native English speakers who are fluent in Mandarin saying e.g. Xi as Si. I don't know if there's a dialectal difference in English or in Mandarin or both that accounts for it. > That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei" It looks better, if you have a certain aesthetic. > "shi" is pronounced "shr" As far as I know Mandarin speakers just consider them the same. Pinyin is designed for native speakers. > "-ian" is pronounced "yen" The e in Pinyin isn't really the English e sound. It's more like the American short u in fun or the NZ short i in pin. It's not obvious what letter to use to represent that, but e is not completely unreasonable. When they do have an e-sound according to the internal logic of Mandarin, it's a variant of an a-sound.
fishywang 5y ago
Do you also blame French system when you mispronounced Guillaume Dubois? Like, French should use a better system to transliterate into Roman alphabet for English pronunciation?
AYBABTME 5y ago
In some place, the transliterated rules aren't up to the name bearer. There's official rules and when you apply for international documents, the government decides how your name looks like in romanized form.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
I'm always puzzled by certain British imperial transliteration schemes that seem to do their best to set you up for failure and embarrassment. Apparently "Burma" is supposed to be pronounced in a non-rhotic fashion, but would it have killed the non-rhotic speakers to write "Bama"? Then the rhotic speakers who form the majority of English speakers would have at least had a fighting chance to get it right. Another thing is their scattering of seemingly pointless "h"s in their transliteration of Devanagari, which together with "s"s leads many speakers to incorrectly assume a fricative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8x36fjvjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8x36fjvjk
- LordAtlas 5y ago
  OK, I'm Indian and I will stipulate that transliterations of Devanagari are inconsistent, but that guy you linked to is just being a crude racist asshole. (0:39 "and it's so appropriate because she's Indian." Fuck you, Paul Henry!) In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in Spanish. Both those consonant sounds do not exist in standard American/British English. What is more exasperating to me is that we are not even consistent in English spellings of the same names. For instance, "Sameer" and "Samir" are both pronounced the same but the first is closer to the actual pronunciation. As far as pronunciation goes, I have made peace with foreigners incorrectly pronouncing sounds that don't exist in their languages, but it bugs me when they can't be arsed to get the syllable emphasis right or when they use the wrong vowel sound even though the correct vowel sound is familiar to them. Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed. Example of #2: I can understand them not pronouncing the soft "t" and "d" in "tandoori", but not so much having the first syllable rhyme with "can" instead of "run". Or "Punjab" becoming "Poon-jab" instead of "Puhn-jaab". Also, #PSA, Hindi does not have the "zh" sound in it, so please stop pronouncing "Raj" as "Razh". Thank you. :)
  - Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
    > In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in Spanish. Both those consonant sounds do not exist in standard American/British English. So he did get the fricative right after all? The sounds certainly exist, unfortunately there is no unambiguous way of denoting them without resorting to the now archaic "ð" and "þ". Could you perhaps shed some light on what a seemingly silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names like "Delhi" and "Bhopal". > Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed. I agree that errors in emphasis are far more jarring than errors in sounds, but using the native cognate in the language being spoken of a foreign name in that category is actually very common and often encouraged by the bearer of the name. Perhaps because it has already been mangled so many times since its Hebrew origin through Koine to all the modern languages that use it. On thing that has always puzzled me is despite of what a dumpster fire Devanagari transliteration to Latin is, it seems to still have a massive buy-in with native speakers online. In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari. I see the same pattern with Malayalam being written in Latin rather than its own script. If there's no need to accommodate people who don't know the script, I fail to see the point. I've asked but people usually get very defensive about it. Are they ashamed of having different scripts from the globally dominant one, Latin? I would rather consider it a point of pride.
mytailorisrich 5y ago
Pinyin is not a transliteration into English, it's a way to write Chinese using the latin alphabet. Learning how to pronounce Pinyin is no difference than learning how to pronounce French or German text. So when you say "why the speaker is blamed rather than the transliteration" it's like saying "why the English speaker is blamed rather than the French spelling" about an English speaker having problems pronouncing a French word.

by prvc 5y ago

Clewza313 5y ago

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 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.

prvc 5y ago
>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.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
Kunrei Shiki is really annoying. Nobody knows how to pronounce Mitutoyo correctly because someone in Japan got scared of the supposed ambiguity caused by "tsu".
- kragen 5y ago
  I recently saw some publicity video by Mitutoyo America on YouTube that pronounced it [mitutɔjou]. All the machinists I watch on YouTube pronounce it [mɪtsutɔjou] though.

sverhagen 5y ago

I find the title misleading, as the link is only covering Chinese. But the same problem exists with other languages that are already using the "Roman alphabet". So, with that in mind, what makes you think the transliteration should be optimized for English? :)

tasogare 5y ago
Yeah, I was kind of blueballed by the page. Maybe the author expected pull requests for other languages?

Epenthesis 5y ago

The goal of pinyin was not to make Mandarin words pronounceable to English speakers, but to be a consistent means of representing the sounds of Mandarin to Mandarin speakers.

phreack 5y ago

Maybe it's transliterated for a more Latin-like crowd where vowels have exactly one pronunciation, like in languages like Spanish, where reading the second columns as they'd naturally think to, would likely be 95% OK

bdon 5y ago

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.

caseyross 5y ago

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.

usrusr 5y ago
Particularly when the dominant language that uses roman letters is lacking a consistent alphabetic encoding system itself. Before you start replacing pinyin, you might want to take a long, critical look at how English is written.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mc32 5y ago

Pinyin is pretty close. At least it's predictable. Wade-Giles is way off -well, I guess it was based off Cantonese? 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.

prvc 5y ago
>But back to pinyin, that was intended as an alphabetic alternative for native Chinese speakers to use instead of pictogram/characters. So it's audience wasn't foreign language speakers and thus will have shortcomings for them. Yes that makes sense, and is reasonable. But the expectation for all foreigners to be familiar with it is not.
- dirkt 5y ago
  But I'd say the expectation that professionals who have to pronounce Chinese names pretty frequently, like those who do announcements at an airport, or newscasters, could spend the time to familiarize themselves with it IS reasonable.
  - carlmr 5y ago
    I agree, it's crazy how often the news talk about China nowadays and almost nobody pronounces the names correctly.
    - mc32 5y ago
      It’s not a big deal. Watch some news in Chinese and you’ll hear similar butchering. It’s so exaggerated US cities are given totally different names in Chinese -there is little resemblance to the North American name of the city.

cabalamat 5y ago

> 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 to adopt a more accurate transliteration instead? Can't be done. The Roman alphabet is a pretty good alphabet for Latin, but it isn't for Chinese, which has different sounds than are in Latin (or English). For example, stop consonants in English have a voiced-unvoiced distinction: /p b t d k g/ Latin is similar: /p b t d k g kw gw/ Chinese is totally different. Instead of a voiced-unvoiced distinction, it has aspirated-unaspirated: /p ph t th k kh/ (with the h denoting an aspirated stop).

akersten 5y ago
Is there a resource (maybe with sound samples) that expands on the voiced/unvoiced vs aspirated/unaspirated distinction? It sounds fascinating, but I'm struggling to conceptualize it just with the text here.
- ylyn 5y ago
  Compare the t in 'stellar' vs the t in 'tell'.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    What's the difference between the t in 'stellar' vs the t in 'tell'? I seem to pronounce them identically, dictionary pronunciation guides (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/stellar?q=stellar https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis... and https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/tell?q=tell https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/englis...) do not make a distinction.. [edit] ah, one (!) of the two "tell" audio recordings in that dictionary seems to pronounce it in a different way that would illustrate the aspiration, but that seems different to how I've usually heard 'tell' being pronounced.
    - bjowen 5y ago

tdeck 5y ago

I wondered this too when learning Pinyin. I believe the reason is that while Pinyin's X and Q may sound like "sh" and "ch" to English speakers, they are actually different sounds (and contrast with the "sh" and "ch" sounds that also exist in Mandarin). That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei", "shi" is pronounced "shr", "-ian" is pronounced "yen", etc... MPS-II seems much closer to intuitive pronunciation for English speakers, although it never caught on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Phonetic_Symbols_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Phonetic_Symbols_II

loycombinate 5y ago
A Chinese teacher once told me that pinyin is based off Russian
- bmn__ 5y ago
  That's more wrong than correct. There's only one minor part of the design where we can see a relation: Latin q resembles Cyrillic ч.
Markoff 5y ago
> That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei", "shi" is pronounced "shr" Shi is pronounced Shr? That sounds more like your typical pirate Beijing hua. Which can get quite confusing when you get out of Beijing to let's say to Shanghai business trip and you can't figure if something cost 4 or 10 kuai at street vendor (my personal anecdote, I think they actually do it on purpose since normally 4 would have very different sound).
squiggleblaz 5y ago
> I believe the reason is that while Pinyin's X and Q may sound like "sh" and "ch" to English speakers, they are actually different sounds (and contrast with the "sh" and "ch" sounds that also exist in Mandarin). Neither Mandarin sh nor x exist in English. X is sharper and is a little more like shy-, whereas sh is darker and a little like shr-. In reality they both strike English speakers as being quite like sh, because we use the space differently. I've heard various native English speakers who are fluent in Mandarin saying e.g. Xi as Si. I don't know if there's a dialectal difference in English or in Mandarin or both that accounts for it. > That said, I still wonder why -ui was chosen for "wei" It looks better, if you have a certain aesthetic. > "shi" is pronounced "shr" As far as I know Mandarin speakers just consider them the same. Pinyin is designed for native speakers. > "-ian" is pronounced "yen" The e in Pinyin isn't really the English e sound. It's more like the American short u in fun or the NZ short i in pin. It's not obvious what letter to use to represent that, but e is not completely unreasonable. When they do have an e-sound according to the internal logic of Mandarin, it's a variant of an a-sound.

fishywang 5y ago

Do you also blame French system when you mispronounced Guillaume Dubois? Like, French should use a better system to transliterate into Roman alphabet for English pronunciation?

AYBABTME 5y ago

In some place, the transliterated rules aren't up to the name bearer. There's official rules and when you apply for international documents, the government decides how your name looks like in romanized form.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago

I'm always puzzled by certain British imperial transliteration schemes that seem to do their best to set you up for failure and embarrassment. Apparently "Burma" is supposed to be pronounced in a non-rhotic fashion, but would it have killed the non-rhotic speakers to write "Bama"? Then the rhotic speakers who form the majority of English speakers would have at least had a fighting chance to get it right. Another thing is their scattering of seemingly pointless "h"s in their transliteration of Devanagari, which together with "s"s leads many speakers to incorrectly assume a fricative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8x36fjvjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l8x36fjvjk

LordAtlas 5y ago
OK, I'm Indian and I will stipulate that transliterations of Devanagari are inconsistent, but that guy you linked to is just being a crude racist asshole. (0:39 "and it's so appropriate because she's Indian." Fuck you, Paul Henry!) In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in Spanish. Both those consonant sounds do not exist in standard American/British English. What is more exasperating to me is that we are not even consistent in English spellings of the same names. For instance, "Sameer" and "Samir" are both pronounced the same but the first is closer to the actual pronunciation. As far as pronunciation goes, I have made peace with foreigners incorrectly pronouncing sounds that don't exist in their languages, but it bugs me when they can't be arsed to get the syllable emphasis right or when they use the wrong vowel sound even though the correct vowel sound is familiar to them. Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed. Example of #2: I can understand them not pronouncing the soft "t" and "d" in "tandoori", but not so much having the first syllable rhyme with "can" instead of "run". Or "Punjab" becoming "Poon-jab" instead of "Puhn-jaab". Also, #PSA, Hindi does not have the "zh" sound in it, so please stop pronouncing "Raj" as "Razh". Thank you. :)
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago
  > In the specific case, her last name would be pronounced "deekshit", with both "d" and "t" being soft like in Spanish. Both those consonant sounds do not exist in standard American/British English. So he did get the fricative right after all? The sounds certainly exist, unfortunately there is no unambiguous way of denoting them without resorting to the now archaic "ð" and "þ". Could you perhaps shed some light on what a seemingly silent "h" after a consonant really indicates? Take names like "Delhi" and "Bhopal". > Example of #1: A friend of mine is named "Manohar". The syllable emphasis and spelling is: "Muh-NOH-huhr". But his name gets pronounced as "Man-oh-HAAR" in the US. And it's not because he's pronouncing it wrong. Imagine if he pronounced every "Michael" as "Mikhail". People would be pissed. I agree that errors in emphasis are far more jarring than errors in sounds, but using the native cognate in the language being spoken of a foreign name in that category is actually very common and often encouraged by the bearer of the name. Perhaps because it has already been mangled so many times since its Hebrew origin through Koine to all the modern languages that use it. On thing that has always puzzled me is despite of what a dumpster fire Devanagari transliteration to Latin is, it seems to still have a massive buy-in with native speakers online. In places like social media or the Indian channels on the company Slack, it seems more common than actual Devanagari. I see the same pattern with Malayalam being written in Latin rather than its own script. If there's no need to accommodate people who don't know the script, I fail to see the point. I've asked but people usually get very defensive about it. Are they ashamed of having different scripts from the globally dominant one, Latin? I would rather consider it a point of pride.

mytailorisrich 5y ago

Pinyin is not a transliteration into English, it's a way to write Chinese using the latin alphabet. Learning how to pronounce Pinyin is no difference than learning how to pronounce French or German text. So when you say "why the speaker is blamed rather than the transliteration" it's like saying "why the English speaker is blamed rather than the French spelling" about an English speaker having problems pronouncing a French word.