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I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no ot

I want to know who thought that chinese transliterated into "english characters" should use a whole bunch of q, x and zs to represent sounds in a way that no other english word does. Why is Zhou pronounced that way?!

jcranmer 1y ago
A few plausible answers to that: In general, it's not transliteration into English characters, it's transliteration into the Latin alphabet. That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet. And given that the English were one of the last powers to actually engage in the naval trade war, they're less likely to be the basis of a major transliteration effort. In the case of the q and x, I believe it comes from 500-year old Portuguese.
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  > That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet Not just European languages. Pinyin is useful for everyone that has to interact with Chinese words, whether their first language is English, French, Swahili, or even Mandarin. A lot of people might not realize that the primary users of Pinyin are Chinese people. The way typing Chinese works is that you type the pronunciation in Pinyin and then a box pops up with choices of characters from which you select the correct one. It's also used in dictionaries to give the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters.
paulmooreparks 1y ago
It's best not to think of Hanyu Pinyin as using "English characters" to pronounce Mandarin. It's just a mapping of the initial, medial, and final sounds onto the Latin alphabet in a consistent way, so that once you know the mapping, you know the pronunciation right away, and more practically, you can _type_ it right away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
- recursivecaveat 1y ago
  I used to always think these romanization schemes were really bad, until I realized they were just not for me. The ease of sight-reading and getting the correct pronunciation for a random english speaker is not the goal. It's primarily for the convenience of users of other languages to have a systematic encoding. To make it pronunciation-friendly you would have to have to add a bunch of complexity to the mapping that would compromise its usage by the real audience.
thaumasiotes 1y ago
Who called them "english characters"? Pinyin uses s in a very common way, z in the way of Italian, and c more or less in the manner of various Slavic languages. They are a sequence of related sounds: s is the fricative, z is affricated, and c is both affricated and aspirated. Sh, zh, and ch are a sequence of sounds related to s, z, and c. Sh is a fricative articulated farther back in the mouth, zh is its affricated form, and ch is both affricated and aspirated. And as a bonus, sh and ch match English usage, which isn't likely to have been a primary concern. It's also worth noting that for many Chinese speakers, there is no difference between s/sh, z/zh, or c/ch. (x, j, and q are what you get if you use the middle of your tongue, instead of the tip, to pronounce sh/zh/ch. They occur before front vowels; sh/zh/ch only appear before back (or central) vowels.) A friend of mine remarked to me once that when she was in school, her teacher informed the class that English speakers would not understand what the pinyin letter "q" was supposed to mean, which I immediately confirmed. She thought this was hilarious.
- ZSHARD 1y ago
  The English are definitely characters.
- wredcoll 1y ago
  Well that is a good point. For some reason I just assumed that pinyin was specific to english and that other languages used different transliteration schemes.
gwd 1y ago
Pinyin was written by Chinese speakers for Chinese speakers. There are other romanizations written by westerners, and these are easier to see where the sounds come from; e.g., "tsai" rather than "cai". What use is "q" as a letter at all in English? It makes a "k" sound and always occurs with a "u" after it. Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.) "C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound? As for "zhou" -- in English, z is very similar to an s, but voiced. So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced. Lots of languages do this BTW. When people from Wycliffe want to translate a Bible into an obscure language without a writing system, they first have to invent a writing system. They could invent all new characters, but why? All it would do is make that language hard to type. So they take the sounds that language has, and map them onto Latin characters. Sometimes there's an obvious mapping, sometimes not. Look up Welsh's spelling for another example of this.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.) What are you thinking of? There is no difference between those things. But your major point here is correct; on the fundamentals there is no reason for the English alphabet to feature a Q. > "C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound? With the modern alphabet there's no reason for a C either. However, the answer to "why not use it for the 'ts' sound" is pretty obvious - that sound isn't part of the English phonemic inventory. It occurs, but that is almost always just a result of what is supposed to be a bare /t/ being followed by /s/ for grammatical reasons. (For an example of the general feeling here, note that an English word cannot start with /ts/ at all.) Why would we use any letter to represent the "ts" sound? We represent it the same way it exists in our language, as a sequence of two unrelated sounds. > So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced. Technically the only voiced consonants in pinyin are m / n / ng / l / r. I think a voicing contrast was present in Middle Chinese, and there's one today in Shanghainese and presumably other Wu dialects, but not in Mandarin.
  - gwd 1y ago
vrc 1y ago
Wait til you get a load of Tamil/Malayalam transliterations’ use of “zh”. It was proposed by some German linguist to represent a really retroflex “r” and now makes outsiders pronounce kozhikode as “cozy-code” instead a closer “korikode”
School-Cotton 1y ago
Your first question, who thought of the system, has a straight answer. From Wikipedia: > Hanyu Pinyin was designed by a group of mostly Chinese linguists, including Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei, Li Jinxi, Luo Changpei, as well as Zhou Youguang (1906–2017), an economist by trade, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s. By the way, they are not “English” characters; they are Latin/Roman characters, and used in a huge number of languages with different spelling conventions. Pinyin was created for the entire world to use, not specifically English speakers.
catlover76 1y ago
[dead]
int_19h 1y ago
How would you spell that sound in a way that is consistently recognized? "zh" is actually one of the more reasonable pinyin digraphs because it follows the same pattern as "sh". If "s" + "h" results in [ʃ], then logically "z" + "h" should result in [ʒ]. "c" is used the way pinyin uses it in many languages (e.g. pretty much all Slavic ones that use the Latin alphabet, for starters). "x" and "q" are more questionable, but there's precedent for either in languages using Latin-based alphabets - "x" can be [ʃ] in Spanish, for example, and "q" is [c͡ç] in Albanian.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > "zh" is actually one of the more reasonable pinyin digraphs because it follows the same pattern as "sh". If "s" + "h" results in [ʃ], then logically "z" + "h" should result in [ʒ]. Note that the sound [ʒ] is common in Mandarin, but its pinyin spelling is "r". "zh" isn't voiced and is affricated.

jcranmer 1y ago

A few plausible answers to that: In general, it's not transliteration into English characters, it's transliteration into the Latin alphabet. That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet. And given that the English were one of the last powers to actually engage in the naval trade war, they're less likely to be the basis of a major transliteration effort. In the case of the q and x, I believe it comes from 500-year old Portuguese.

School-Cotton 1y ago
> That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet Not just European languages. Pinyin is useful for everyone that has to interact with Chinese words, whether their first language is English, French, Swahili, or even Mandarin. A lot of people might not realize that the primary users of Pinyin are Chinese people. The way typing Chinese works is that you type the pronunciation in Pinyin and then a box pops up with choices of characters from which you select the correct one. It's also used in dictionaries to give the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters.

paulmooreparks 1y ago

It's best not to think of Hanyu Pinyin as using "English characters" to pronounce Mandarin. It's just a mapping of the initial, medial, and final sounds onto the Latin alphabet in a consistent way, so that once you know the mapping, you know the pronunciation right away, and more practically, you can _type_ it right away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

recursivecaveat 1y ago
I used to always think these romanization schemes were really bad, until I realized they were just not for me. The ease of sight-reading and getting the correct pronunciation for a random english speaker is not the goal. It's primarily for the convenience of users of other languages to have a systematic encoding. To make it pronunciation-friendly you would have to have to add a bunch of complexity to the mapping that would compromise its usage by the real audience.

thaumasiotes 1y ago

Who called them "english characters"? Pinyin uses s in a very common way, z in the way of Italian, and c more or less in the manner of various Slavic languages. They are a sequence of related sounds: s is the fricative, z is affricated, and c is both affricated and aspirated. Sh, zh, and ch are a sequence of sounds related to s, z, and c. Sh is a fricative articulated farther back in the mouth, zh is its affricated form, and ch is both affricated and aspirated. And as a bonus, sh and ch match English usage, which isn't likely to have been a primary concern. It's also worth noting that for many Chinese speakers, there is no difference between s/sh, z/zh, or c/ch. (x, j, and q are what you get if you use the middle of your tongue, instead of the tip, to pronounce sh/zh/ch. They occur before front vowels; sh/zh/ch only appear before back (or central) vowels.) A friend of mine remarked to me once that when she was in school, her teacher informed the class that English speakers would not understand what the pinyin letter "q" was supposed to mean, which I immediately confirmed. She thought this was hilarious.

ZSHARD 1y ago
The English are definitely characters.
wredcoll 1y ago
Well that is a good point. For some reason I just assumed that pinyin was specific to english and that other languages used different transliteration schemes.

gwd 1y ago

Pinyin was written by Chinese speakers for Chinese speakers. There are other romanizations written by westerners, and these are easier to see where the sounds come from; e.g., "tsai" rather than "cai". What use is "q" as a letter at all in English? It makes a "k" sound and always occurs with a "u" after it. Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.) "C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound? As for "zhou" -- in English, z is very similar to an s, but voiced. So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced. Lots of languages do this BTW. When people from Wycliffe want to translate a Bible into an obscure language without a writing system, they first have to invent a writing system. They could invent all new characters, but why? All it would do is make that language hard to type. So they take the sounds that language has, and map them onto Latin characters. Sometimes there's an obvious mapping, sometimes not. Look up Welsh's spelling for another example of this.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.) What are you thinking of? There is no difference between those things. But your major point here is correct; on the fundamentals there is no reason for the English alphabet to feature a Q. > "C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound? With the modern alphabet there's no reason for a C either. However, the answer to "why not use it for the 'ts' sound" is pretty obvious - that sound isn't part of the English phonemic inventory. It occurs, but that is almost always just a result of what is supposed to be a bare /t/ being followed by /s/ for grammatical reasons. (For an example of the general feeling here, note that an English word cannot start with /ts/ at all.) Why would we use any letter to represent the "ts" sound? We represent it the same way it exists in our language, as a sequence of two unrelated sounds. > So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced. Technically the only voiced consonants in pinyin are m / n / ng / l / r. I think a voicing contrast was present in Middle Chinese, and there's one today in Shanghainese and presumably other Wu dialects, but not in Mandarin.
- gwd 1y ago

vrc 1y ago

Wait til you get a load of Tamil/Malayalam transliterations’ use of “zh”. It was proposed by some German linguist to represent a really retroflex “r” and now makes outsiders pronounce kozhikode as “cozy-code” instead a closer “korikode”

School-Cotton 1y ago

Your first question, who thought of the system, has a straight answer. From Wikipedia: > Hanyu Pinyin was designed by a group of mostly Chinese linguists, including Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei, Li Jinxi, Luo Changpei, as well as Zhou Youguang (1906–2017), an economist by trade, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s. By the way, they are not “English” characters; they are Latin/Roman characters, and used in a huge number of languages with different spelling conventions. Pinyin was created for the entire world to use, not specifically English speakers.

catlover76 1y ago

[dead]

int_19h 1y ago

How would you spell that sound in a way that is consistently recognized? "zh" is actually one of the more reasonable pinyin digraphs because it follows the same pattern as "sh". If "s" + "h" results in [ʃ], then logically "z" + "h" should result in [ʒ]. "c" is used the way pinyin uses it in many languages (e.g. pretty much all Slavic ones that use the Latin alphabet, for starters). "x" and "q" are more questionable, but there's precedent for either in languages using Latin-based alphabets - "x" can be [ʃ] in Spanish, for example, and "q" is [c͡ç] in Albanian.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> "zh" is actually one of the more reasonable pinyin digraphs because it follows the same pattern as "sh". If "s" + "h" results in [ʃ], then logically "z" + "h" should result in [ʒ]. Note that the sound [ʒ] is common in Mandarin, but its pinyin spelling is "r". "zh" isn't voiced and is affricated.