Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 August 10

= August 10 =

Gallup's most admired man and woman poll
Why was Gallup's most admired man and woman poll not run in 1976? , from Gallup's website, notes that it wasn't run that year, but doesn't explain why. Nyttend (talk) 01:18, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

Chinese surname changes
How common is it for Chinese living in English speaking countries to change their surname to a variation reflection dialect pronunciation? Such as Zhang to Tsan? KAVEBEAR (talk) 23:12, 10 August 2019 (UTC)


 * The great majority of Chinese immigrants to the United States in the 19th century came from south China. Many of them were not very educated, and would not have known (or cared too much) how their name would be pronounced in Mandarin (i.e. north China).  The spelling of their name in English would naturally usually reflect how they pronounced their name in their native dialect (see Taishanese etc).  In any case, before the May Fourth Movement, the official language of China was basically archaic literary written Chinese, not spoken Mandarin... -- AnonMoos (talk) 00:23, 11 August 2019 (UTC)


 * Wade–Giles might be of interest. 107.15.157.44 (talk) 01:52, 11 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Most Chinese people in Britain are Cantonese speakers, having come to the UK via the various former-British colonies in the Far East, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Singapore in particular. Alansplodge (talk) 10:59, 11 August 2019 (UTC)


 * I concur with AnonMoos’ analysis. In modern cases, people will almost invariably use the transliteration system most popular in their region: mainlanders using pinyin, Taiwanese using Wade-Giles, and people from HK using Yale or Jyutping or something else. The most common variation I’ve seen is actually in bisyllabic given names and whether to use a space, a hyphen, or nothing between the syllables. For instance I had a professor who was a mainlander and wrote his name with the pinyin spelling, but hyphenated his given name. —/M endaliv /2¢/Δ's/ 10:58, 11 August 2019 (UTC)