Stircrazy wrote:

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steven wrote:

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Heard on the BBC News earlier today: "It's good news for British number one Emma Boulter"

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That is priceless! 

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Sub-titles can be another endless source of amusement.  "Alcaraz" earlier this afternoon came up as "Alcatraz".   

Another beef on the pronunciation front:  why are the commentators insisting on pronouncing the surname of Harriet Dart's Chinese opponent, Wang Xinyu, as though it were spelt "Wong"?  I know the Yanks do it, as witness the actor, B D Wong, who appeared in L&O:  SVU as the character Dr George Huang.  All of his fellow cast members refer to him as "Wong".  I'm not quibbling about the dropped aitch - I readily admit that I know too little about Mandarin pronunciation to question it - but I don't understand the failure to distinguish between an "a" & an "o".  Otherwise, why bother to make that distinction when the names are transliterated? 

Brendan F wrote:

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Stircrazy wrote:

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Another beef on the pronunciation front:  why are the commentators insisting on pronouncing the surname of Harriet Dart's Chinese opponent, Wang Xinyu, as though it were spelt "Wong"?  I know the Yanks do it, as witness the actor, B D Wong, who appeared in L&O:  SVU as the character Dr George Huang.  All of his fellow cast members referred to him as "Wong".  I'm not quibbling about the dropped aitch - I readily admit that I know too little about Mandarin pronunciation to question it - but I don't understand the failure to distinguish between an "a" & an "o".  Otherwise, why bother to make that distinction when the names are transliterated?

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 Isn't the whole point of transliteration to spell it how it's pronounced? Otherwise why bother giving a Roman alphabet equivalent? 

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That's precisely my point!  Why bother having the surname transliterated as WAng when it's meant to be pronounced WOng?  I note that the umpire is saying WAng, not that umpires are an infallible guide...

Nick Kyrios isn't very impressed with Andrew Castle. Article in The Times this evening

https://archive.ph/Wc4ET

Stircrazy wrote:

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Brendan F wrote:

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Stircrazy wrote:

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Another beef on the pronunciation front:  why are the commentators insisting on pronouncing the surname of Harriet Dart's Chinese opponent, Wang Xinyu, as though it were spelt "Wong"?  I know the Yanks do it, as witness the actor, B D Wong, who appeared in L&O:  SVU as the character Dr George Huang.  All of his fellow cast members referred to him as "Wong".  I'm not quibbling about the dropped aitch - I readily admit that I know too little about Mandarin pronunciation to question it - but I don't understand the failure to distinguish between an "a" & an "o".  Otherwise, why bother to make that distinction when the names are transliterated?

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 Isn't the whole point of transliteration to spell it how it's pronounced? Otherwise why bother giving a Roman alphabet equivalent? 

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That's precisely my point!  Why bother having the surname transliterated as WAng when it's meant to be pronounced WOng?  I note that the umpire is saying WAng, not that umpires are an infallible guide...

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This explanation will be far more than most of you might ever want to know but it's complicated, and I'm hoping that one (i.e. just SC!) or two of you might find it interesting. 

When you start learning Chinese, you quickly realise that while pinyin* is good at lulling you into a (false) sense of security, you can't just say words the way you'd say them if they were spelt that way in English. That shouldn't come as a huge surprise - even nearby European countries don't pronounce all letters the same way as us!

Some consonants do sound much the same but if you try to say pinyin r, x, c, q, etc as you would in English, you're quickly going to come a cropper. Other consonants are much closer to each other than in English, e.g. b/p, r/l, which explains why the French still call Beijing Pékin and the Chinese get their own back by calling Paris Bali (not to be confused with the Indonesian island, which is pronounced exactly the same in Chinese but, mercifully for those catching flights from China to either place, is written with different characters)   

With vowels, it's quite subtle. Often the standard Chinese pronunciation is somewhere in between English vowels. Wang is a particularly complicated one. Here, the pinyin final is 'ang' but it doesn't sound like -ang (as it looks like it should) or -ong (as some Chinese people will tell you it should - that gives a clue as to why some Chinese people pronounce 'ong' a bit oddly in English words).

If anything, it's closer to the 'ung' sound in 'tongue' or 'young', at least in northern standard Mandarin, which is what I've studied. The way this Chinese person says Wang https://youtu.be/ZxZVrgQc6JI?t=24 matches how I hear and say it, though because the vowel modulates a bit (and because we have slightly different ways of saying some vowels in English depending on the region we come from!), some might still hear it as Wang, Wong, or even Waung or Wuang.  

Additional complication is provided by the fact that the same Chinese character can be pronounced in different ways in northern and southern Mandarin, in Cantonese (used in, for example, HK and Guangdong - a completely different language from Mandarin even though most of the words look the same in Chinese characters), in Wu (=Shanghainese), etc, etc. For all I know, the players called Wang who say it should be pronounced Wong come from the south and maybe it really is much closer to Wong down there, or at least closer to Wong than Wang. 

* pinyin is the PRC's romanisation system - Taiwan has a different transliteration system (sometimes known as bopomofo) that doesn't use roman letters - that makes it harder to recognise the letters that do sound the same as in English but easier to avoid all the pitfalls when the sounds aren't the same.

Taiwan does have a romanisation system too, but it's not the same as pinyin. For example, top doubles player Hsieh Su-wei would have her name romanised as Xie Shuwei if she came from the PRC.

To be fair to the Chinese, pinyin is much better than the earlier standard, a European attempt at romanisation known as Wade-Giles - that was the reason why Beijing used to be known as Peking, Guangdong as Canton, Tianjin as Tientsin and so on - contrary to popular belief in the West, the Chinese themselves never changed the names of these places in Chinese characters or the way they pronounced them, it was just the way they were transliterated that changed, and the Chinese pinyin system, for all its flaws and pitfalls, gets much closer to the real sounds than Wade-Giles ever did.

steven wrote:

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Stircrazy wrote:

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Brendan F wrote:

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Stircrazy wrote:

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Another beef on the pronunciation front:  why are the commentators insisting on pronouncing the surname of Harriet Dart's Chinese opponent, Wang Xinyu, as though it were spelt "Wong"?  I know the Yanks do it, as witness the actor, B D Wong, who appeared in L&O:  SVU as the character Dr George Huang.  All of his fellow cast members referred to him as "Wong".  I'm not quibbling about the dropped aitch - I readily admit that I know too little about Mandarin pronunciation to question it - but I don't understand the failure to distinguish between an "a" & an "o".  Otherwise, why bother to make that distinction when the names are transliterated?

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 Isn't the whole point of transliteration to spell it how it's pronounced? Otherwise why bother giving a Roman alphabet equivalent? 

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That's precisely my point!  Why bother having the surname transliterated as WAng when it's meant to be pronounced WOng?  I note that the umpire is saying WAng, not that umpires are an infallible guide...

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This explanation will be far more than most of you might ever want to know but it's complicated, and I'm hoping that one (i.e. just SC!) or two of you might find it interesting. 

When you start learning Chinese, you quickly realise that while pinyin* is good at lulling you into a (false) sense of security, you can't just say words the way you'd say them if they were spelt that way in English. That shouldn't come as a huge surprise - even nearby European countries don't pronounce all letters the same way as us!

Some consonants do sound much the same but if you try to say pinyin r, x, c, q, etc as you would in English, you're quickly going to come a cropper. Other consonants are much closer to each other than in English, e.g. b/p, r/l, which explains why the French still call Beijing Pékin and the Chinese get their own back by calling Paris Bali (not to be confused with the Indonesian island, which is pronounced exactly the same in Chinese but, mercifully for those catching flights from China to either place, is written with different characters)   

With vowels, it's quite subtle. Often the standard Chinese pronunciation is somewhere in between English vowels. Wang is a particularly complicated one. Here, the pinyin final is 'ang' but it doesn't sound like -ang (as it looks like it should) or -ong (as some Chinese people will tell you it should - that gives a clue as to why some Chinese people pronounce 'ong' a bit oddly in English words).

If anything, it's closer to the 'ung' sound in 'tongue' or 'young', at least in northern standard Mandarin, which is what I've studied. The way this Chinese person says Wang https://youtu.be/ZxZVrgQc6JI?t=24 matches how I hear and say it, though because the vowel modulates a bit (and because we have slightly different ways of saying some vowels in English depending on the region we come from!), some might still hear it as Wang, Wong, or even Waung or Wuang.  

Additional complication is provided by the fact that the same Chinese character can be pronounced in different ways in northern and southern Mandarin, in Cantonese (used in, for example, HK and Guangdong - a completely different language from Mandarin even though most of the words look the same in Chinese characters), in Wu (=Shanghainese), etc, etc. For all I know, the players called Wang who say it should be pronounced Wong come from the south and maybe it really is much closer to Wong down there, or at least closer to Wong than Wang. 

 

* pinyin is the PRC's romanisation system - Taiwan has a different transliteration system (sometimes known as bopomofo) that doesn't use roman letters - that makes it harder to recognise the letters that do sound the same as in English but easier to avoid all the pitfalls when the sounds aren't the same.

Taiwan does have a romanisation system too, but it's not the same as pinyin. For example, top doubles player Hsieh Su-wei would have her name romanised as Xie Shuwei if she came from the PRC.

To be fair to the Chinese, pinyin is much better than the earlier standard, a European attempt at romanisation known as Wade-Giles - that was the reason why Beijing used to be known as Peking, Guangdong as Canton, Tianjin as Tientsin and so on - contrary to popular belief in the West, the Chinese themselves never changed the names of these places in Chinese characters or the way they pronounced them, it was just the way they were transliterated that changed, and the Chinese pinyin system, for all its flaws and pitfalls, gets much closer to the real sounds than Wade-Giles ever did.

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Thanks for that, Steven, very instructive.  I was hoping you might wade in at some stage.  I love the Paris-Bali example - up there with the Polish version of "Rome", viz. Rzym...

I know next to nothing about the pronunciation of Chinese names (& the few words in English which are of Chinese origin - on which subject this Wiki page makes fascinating reading.  I knew about "chin chin", "chop chop", "typhoon", "kowtow", "tea", "ketchup" & obviously the other food terms, but I was intrigued to learn of the origins of "brainwash" & "paper tiger").  That said, I was aware of the pinyin system &, after years of looking at Chinese tennis players' names, have come to realise that if they begin with "Hs", it's odds on that they're Taiwanese.  Your explanation that the Taiwanese use a different system of transliteration suddenly makes sense.

I always remember how, on my only visit to China (a day trip up the Pearl River from Hong Kong), we were on our way back from Guangzhou/Canton by train (having reached it on the outward journey by hydrofoil for the first part & then by bus).  Given the length of the journey, a Cantonese film was shown - with Chinese sub-titles!  We were told that that was because spoken Cantonese was very different from spoken Mandarin, although the characters were the same.  I suppose that there are parallels on the place name front with India, where cities have also in relatively recent years been renamed in English, but not in the relevant local language (of which there are, of course, many more in India than there are in China), e.g. Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai) & (arguably the greatest change for native English-speakers) Madras (Chennai).

Off topic, my latest Clare Balding beef:  she's been pronouncing the first syllable of Lorenzo Musetti's surname like the first syllable of "music"!