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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Pinyin is predictable if you memorize every single syllable that exists, it is not logical on a letter-by-letter basis.

For example, "liu" should be pronounced "liou" and "shui" should be pronounced "shuei", but the "o" and "e" are omitted in Pinyin for brevity. Similarly, the "u" in lu and mu is different from the "u" in "ju" and "qu"; the latter is actually "jü" and "qü" as in "nü" and "lü", again the diareses are omitted purely for the convenience of the writer. The "a" in "yan" and "ya"/"yang" is completely different, etc.

I like Pinyin as a reasonably concise input method, but it's not great for romanizing names.

Probably you speak more Chinese than I do, but as I understand it, you don't have to memorize the syllables, just the 22 (?) onsets and 17 (?) vowel+codas, same as in bopomofo, just more sneakily. Plus nü and lü, I guess. But that still means memorizing 41 pronunciations instead of the 374 you suggest. Is that right, or is the situation far more complicated than it appears?

I've never learned bopomofo in earnest, and for pinyin I just memorized everything that felt like an exception to me, even though it might have some internal logic. For example, I guess that the "a" in "yan" is different from "lan" because "yan" is its own coda, whereas "lan" is "l" + "an"?

Hmm, I don't know.

> liu" should be pronounced "liou" and "shui" should be pronounced "shuei"

This is nuanced: in some cases it’s omission for brevity [1] and in other cases it’s how the phonemes sound 100 years ago [2]. And if you pronounce them fast enough there isn’t much difference.

The omitted diaeresis is certainly for brevity, although using v is more common to me.

[1]: https://www.zhihu.com/question/26010099 [2]: https://www.zhihu.com/question/313646560

> 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.

Sorry... what? Us non native speaker live in a world where English is taught in almost any school on the planet and where you have a peer pressure to know and speak decently English. This on top of one of the most irregular languages in the world wrt pronunciation of dictionary words, let alone names.

PS good luck getting right Greenwich, for example.

As a native English speaker, for the most part I typically know what someone means when they say "gl-OW-kester square" or "Green-witch mean time", so don't worry about it.

I have a Russian friend who has specifically asked me to go out of my way to correct their mispronunciations, but for the most part if someone says an English word in a weird I don't even blink.

I'd say part of being an effective English communicator is not just about speaking English, but also about being able to understand foreign English accents (and I include different dialects of native English in that as well).

> I have a Russian friend who has specifically asked me to go out of my way to correct their mispronunciations, but for the most part if someone says an English word in a weird I don't even blink.

Yes, English has so many weird native dialects that weird foreign pronunciations shouldn’t throw you off either.

The Finns seems obtuse in their insistence on using Finnish phonology when speaking English, which is easy to make light of on the surface, but when you think about it it’s not actually a bad system. It’s consistent, easy to understand and it lets them focus on gaining fluency over memorising pointless irregular pronunciations.

English is also unusually flexible, something I noticed abroad. In English you can do ridiculous wrong things and still create something that a skilled listener can easily understand. Subject and verb all you know? Eh, I can guess from context.

Try putting the subject and verb in the wrong order in Japanese or forget your counter particle for a particular kind of counting and you just get blank stares.

I think that English, for its many faults, is at least extremely error tolerant in terms of it being possible to say something that's comprehensible enough dozens of ways and often with words practically in random order. It's probably the most amazing thing about English to me, although I only know a few other languages they are much more strict.

I think you have to understand that "international English" is not the same as English. We have the same thing in France where lots of people come to study from other countries where they speak French, and their French is a little different. I'm not going to waste anyone's time on correcting someone because they said "le table" and not "la table". Same thing with the pronunciation. I can understand them, they can understand me, and that's what matters. That's the "price" of having a huge influence in the world.

>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.

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.

I agree, it's crazy how often the news talk about China nowadays and almost nobody pronounces the names correctly.

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.

That's true, although in Chinese these are official transliterations as Hanzi.

I think if someone says Milan in English instead of Milano it's fine because the city has an English name as well.

Right, often what they do is they try to find "close" syllables. Close is the wrong term as some are not close at all. Vancouver and Philadelphia for example.

It's like taking Milano and cutting it up into Mil + Ano and saying, hmm, in English the closest syllables are approximately Mill + Anus, we'll call it Millanus, oh, but that's got a word we should avoid so let's call it MillLand.

The point is, it's not wrong or bad for (any) people to get foreign words wrong when they pronounce them.

You fail to understand most of the world use international English where nobody really cares about correct pronunciation, but about understanding each other and only small minority of English users are nowadays native English speakers, one could say it's questionable nowadays what is the correct pronunciation (intended original use changed), so it would be quite foolish to insist on correct pronunciation in international enviroment.

I don't think same can be said about English native speakers who usually don't speak even second language and can't go their way to at least pronounce few names correctly, while rest of the world is learning whole other language, not just pronunciation of bunch of names.

Agreed with your pinyin commnets.

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