Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2016 May 21

= May 21 =

How would Chinese people in the US in the 1920s and 1930s render their names?
Would it be according to Wade Giles? Also what would be the correct rendering of Liu Shijiu (刘世久) in Wade Giles? I've looked at this table and get Liu Shih Chiu. Is that correct? http://library.ust.hk/guides/opac/conversion-tables.html S2sokay (talk) 14:45, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
 * It is correct, and Chinese people would have used Wade Giles, if they knew how to, as pinyin hadn't caught on yet. KägeTorä - (影虎)  ( もしもし！ ) 16:58, 21 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Unless they spoke Cantonese or another variety of Chinese and preferred to transliterate using the Cantonese pronunciation or pronunciation in their home variety? (Wade-Giles is based on Mandarin.) --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 10:50, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
 * PalaceGuard is quite right. Most Chinese people in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s were Cantonese, and they largely used makeshift transliterations from Cantonese to spell their names in English.  Marco polo (talk) 14:09, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Further thought: even quite literate Mandarin speakers might have used something not quite systematic: e.g. Yuen Ren Chao not "Yuen Jen Chao". And Ieoh Ming Pei is an example of someone who used Wu, rather than Mandarin or Cantonese, as the basis for transliteration.
 * Another important note for the OP is that overseas Chinese people in the 1920s and 1930s would most likely have put their surnames last - so the person in question was more likely to have been Shih-Chiu Liu than Liu Shih-Chiu. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 14:59, 23 May 2016 (UTC)