5 ms·

> I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelli

by tivert 2y ago

> I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;) That's even less likely now than in the past, with the elite cultural trends in English-speaking countries favoring the adoption of foreign spellings and pronunciation. That just piles on the complexity to unmanageable levels. IMHO, for instance, there's no excuse for the requirement that English newspaper readers know Pinyin [1], rather than some more English-friendly romanization system, to be able to read news about China, when Chinese speakers themselves use a completely different, non-roman writing system. What's next, just printing the Chinese characters without romanization? Pinyin has its uses, but writing things out for foreigners is not something it does well. [1] which gives many letters very unexpected values (e.g. c = ts) and many vowels are impossible for an English-speaker to guess correctly.

hosh 2y ago
Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?
- tivert 2y ago
  > Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers. It's terrible for English speakers. > Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”? English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing English orthography (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language.
  - hosh 2y ago
    Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations. I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
    - tivert 2y ago
      > I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language. It's not an issue of cultural dominance, as no one would be forcing the Chinese to change their names or their pronunciations. It's basically just keeping English from being even more unmanageable, in a way many other languages do, including Chinese. If an English name or other word is used in Chinese (or in Japanese, or many other languages) it gets localized. For instance, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A. The Chinese speakers are mostly talking about Trump, but the only name I could actually pick out was Obama's (probably because "Trump" is hard to pronounce in Chinese). Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-donald-trump-name-meaning/97034962/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us." Also, the English use of Pinyin can have some unfortunate effects. I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" almost 100% of the time (there was a strong preference for first-name use in the office, so it rarely happened to his face).
      - inkyoto 2y ago
        > Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us." Consider a rather unusual (but real nevertheless) Polish surname: «Brzęczyszczykiewicz». Most native English speakers, who are not well known for their patience with long and unusually looking non-native surnames, will instantly give up and shorten it to a mere «B». The most daring and adventurous ones will persevere and will likely arrive at something akin to «Brenshistishkevich», which is neither correct nor easily pronounceable for an English speaker anyway. The few English speakers who are acquainted with Polish, would render and pronounce «Brzęczyszczykiewicz» as «Bzhenchishchikyevich» which is closer to truth, yet it will confuse everyone else who will stick with «Brenshistishkevich» anyway. Or consider an Icelandic surname of «Þórðarson». We would have «Thordarson» (as a naïve take) or «Thortharson» (somewhat closer to the actual Icelandic version). Bonus point: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a Welsh surname, with the «colloquial» vocalisation of «Lanfarpwilgwingle» vs «Hlan-fair-pool-gwin-gith» (a more truthful rendition). In all cases, with Brenshistishkevich, Thordarson and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, we have arrived at the English equivalent of Te Lang Pu (Trump). In fact, there is no need to look at more extreme cases, it will suffice to consider a simple Vietnamese name of «Huy», which most English speakers will pronounce as «Hughey» whereas it is actually «Hwee» – it is still the case of the English Te Lang Pu. In the case of Mandarin Chinese, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Chinese writing script is logographic and can't encode single consonants (single sounds in general, although there are Chinese characters that encode vowelled words, usually exclamations). Secondly (or firstly, in fact), all Chinese languages have a strict rule of a phoneme having the CV(C) structure (Consonant-Vowel(maybe another Consonant)), which makes the CCVCC (i.e. Trump) compound impossible and is completely against the phonetic rules of the language. And many, very many in fact, Chinese speakers neither know pinyin nor speak English. The same is true for many other non-Chinese languages. It gets a bit better, e.g., in Japanese that, other than the logographic script, has two syllabaries that make it possible to represent Trump as something probably more like Tu-ru-mpu. > I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" […] Since you also earlier called out «[…] (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language», spelling Cao as Tsao (which is what they do in Taiwan but not in the mainland) is not going help as nearly all English speakers will drop the «t» and pronounce it as «Sao». And, since «ts» is one sound and not two, «Sao» is also the English Te Lang Pu.
samatman 2y ago
There are basically political reasons for this. Wade-Giles is associated with Taiwan, and is in fact mostly used when referring to Taiwanese subjects, I've always seen Kaohsiung for the city, never Gāoxióng. The Mainlanders would find it very insulting to not use Pinyin when referring to subjects in the PRC, so understandably, American journalism goes along with that. For what it's worth I think both systems have different disadvantages, in that neither does a good job of reflecting the actual pronunciation of Guoyu. Excuse me, Putonghua. Doing so with the English character set isn't actually possible.
- int_19h 2y ago
  It's not the character set that's the problem so much so as the set of phonemes. English just doesn't have the ʂ/ɕ distinction, and no amount of creative spelling choices can fix that. Other things are much more straightforward, tones aside.
makeitdouble 2y ago
For what it's worth CJK countries tend to give less weight to how foreign names are pronounced. For instance the current PRC secretary name is pronounced accordingly to the characters' reading in Taiwan and Japan, and won't have much in common. Same way Chinese people will read Japanese name as the characters sound to them, without referring to the actual Japanese reading, even if in Japan these names have a designated original reading.
int_19h 2y ago
"c" for "ts" has a very long history in Latin script - pretty much all Slavic languages and many other Eastern European languages that use Latin use it in this manner, as does German in many cases. That's why it also has this meaning in Esperanto. I do agree that the currently dominant English convention of adopting spelling from other languages (or their standard Romanization system) as is - or worse yet, dropping all the diacritics but keeping everything else as is - is misguided. But it doesn't help that English spelling can get very unwieldy when trying to spell something phonetically, especially across many dialects of English due to considerable variability in how things are pronounced. This has also caused problems - for an example of that, look at the still-common Korean Romanization of names such as "Park" which does not accurately represent the actual pronunciation if you pronounce it as an American would ("r" is silent - it reflects the non-rhotic British pronunciation, and was put there because the more straightforward "Pak" would tend to be pronounced incorrectly by a Brit).

by tivert 2y ago

hosh 2y ago

Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?

tivert 2y ago
> Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers. It's terrible for English speakers. > Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”? English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing English orthography (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language.
- hosh 2y ago
  Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations. I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.
  - tivert 2y ago
    > I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language. It's not an issue of cultural dominance, as no one would be forcing the Chinese to change their names or their pronunciations. It's basically just keeping English from being even more unmanageable, in a way many other languages do, including Chinese. If an English name or other word is used in Chinese (or in Japanese, or many other languages) it gets localized. For instance, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A. The Chinese speakers are mostly talking about Trump, but the only name I could actually pick out was Obama's (probably because "Trump" is hard to pronounce in Chinese). Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-donald-trump-name-meaning/97034962/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us." Also, the English use of Pinyin can have some unfortunate effects. I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" almost 100% of the time (there was a strong preference for first-name use in the office, so it rarely happened to his face).
    - inkyoto 2y ago
      > Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us." Consider a rather unusual (but real nevertheless) Polish surname: «Brzęczyszczykiewicz». Most native English speakers, who are not well known for their patience with long and unusually looking non-native surnames, will instantly give up and shorten it to a mere «B». The most daring and adventurous ones will persevere and will likely arrive at something akin to «Brenshistishkevich», which is neither correct nor easily pronounceable for an English speaker anyway. The few English speakers who are acquainted with Polish, would render and pronounce «Brzęczyszczykiewicz» as «Bzhenchishchikyevich» which is closer to truth, yet it will confuse everyone else who will stick with «Brenshistishkevich» anyway. Or consider an Icelandic surname of «Þórðarson». We would have «Thordarson» (as a naïve take) or «Thortharson» (somewhat closer to the actual Icelandic version). Bonus point: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a Welsh surname, with the «colloquial» vocalisation of «Lanfarpwilgwingle» vs «Hlan-fair-pool-gwin-gith» (a more truthful rendition). In all cases, with Brenshistishkevich, Thordarson and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, we have arrived at the English equivalent of Te Lang Pu (Trump). In fact, there is no need to look at more extreme cases, it will suffice to consider a simple Vietnamese name of «Huy», which most English speakers will pronounce as «Hughey» whereas it is actually «Hwee» – it is still the case of the English Te Lang Pu. In the case of Mandarin Chinese, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Chinese writing script is logographic and can't encode single consonants (single sounds in general, although there are Chinese characters that encode vowelled words, usually exclamations). Secondly (or firstly, in fact), all Chinese languages have a strict rule of a phoneme having the CV(C) structure (Consonant-Vowel(maybe another Consonant)), which makes the CCVCC (i.e. Trump) compound impossible and is completely against the phonetic rules of the language. And many, very many in fact, Chinese speakers neither know pinyin nor speak English. The same is true for many other non-Chinese languages. It gets a bit better, e.g., in Japanese that, other than the logographic script, has two syllabaries that make it possible to represent Trump as something probably more like Tu-ru-mpu. > I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" […] Since you also earlier called out «[…] (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language», spelling Cao as Tsao (which is what they do in Taiwan but not in the mainland) is not going help as nearly all English speakers will drop the «t» and pronounce it as «Sao». And, since «ts» is one sound and not two, «Sao» is also the English Te Lang Pu.

samatman 2y ago

There are basically political reasons for this. Wade-Giles is associated with Taiwan, and is in fact mostly used when referring to Taiwanese subjects, I've always seen Kaohsiung for the city, never Gāoxióng. The Mainlanders would find it very insulting to not use Pinyin when referring to subjects in the PRC, so understandably, American journalism goes along with that. For what it's worth I think both systems have different disadvantages, in that neither does a good job of reflecting the actual pronunciation of Guoyu. Excuse me, Putonghua. Doing so with the English character set isn't actually possible.

int_19h 2y ago
It's not the character set that's the problem so much so as the set of phonemes. English just doesn't have the ʂ/ɕ distinction, and no amount of creative spelling choices can fix that. Other things are much more straightforward, tones aside.

makeitdouble 2y ago

For what it's worth CJK countries tend to give less weight to how foreign names are pronounced. For instance the current PRC secretary name is pronounced accordingly to the characters' reading in Taiwan and Japan, and won't have much in common. Same way Chinese people will read Japanese name as the characters sound to them, without referring to the actual Japanese reading, even if in Japan these names have a designated original reading.

int_19h 2y ago

"c" for "ts" has a very long history in Latin script - pretty much all Slavic languages and many other Eastern European languages that use Latin use it in this manner, as does German in many cases. That's why it also has this meaning in Esperanto. I do agree that the currently dominant English convention of adopting spelling from other languages (or their standard Romanization system) as is - or worse yet, dropping all the diacritics but keeping everything else as is - is misguided. But it doesn't help that English spelling can get very unwieldy when trying to spell something phonetically, especially across many dialects of English due to considerable variability in how things are pronounced. This has also caused problems - for an example of that, look at the still-common Korean Romanization of names such as "Park" which does not accurately represent the actual pronunciation if you pronounce it as an American would ("r" is silent - it reflects the non-rhotic British pronunciation, and was put there because the more straightforward "Pak" would tend to be pronounced incorrectly by a Brit).