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Comment by prvc | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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