Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 June 16

= June 16 =

Chinese names
Mao Tse-tung has been re-rendered Mao Zedong with recent schemes of romanising Chinese. Why hasn't Sun Yat-sen been re-rendered to avoid the hyphen? Nyttend (talk) 00:30, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Re-rendered by whom? The 'recent scheme' was designed by Chinese philologists (in the 1950s) primarily for the use of Chinese (actually Modern Standard Mandarin) speakers/writers, unlike previous schemes such as Yale and Wade–Giles that were designed by Western philologists for Western readers. This has led to many Western misconceptions, because the pronunciations of letters in Pinyin is often not, and is not intended to be, those usual in Western orthographies – instead they have been repurposed for MSM, which has sounds that English (for example) does not have or does not recognise.
 * An example is 'Beijing', the 'new' spelling in Pinyin, in which 'B' and 'j' are not pronounced as they are in English – 'B' is an unaspirated 'p' (such as in 'spark' rather than 'pit') and 'j' is nonexistent in English but could be rendered something like 'chy' or 'kw'.
 * So to see a deliberate Pinyin rendering of Sun Yat-sen, one would have to be reading either a MSM Pinyin reference to him, or a Western-language reference whose writer has chosen to use the Pinyin rendering.
 * What is the Pinyin rendering of Sun Yat-sen, anyway? {the poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 46.65.228.117 (talk) 04:23, 16 June 2023 (UTC)


 * 46.65.228.117 -- If some Chinese sounds are not directly comparable to English sounds, then it's inevitable that any rendering of Chinese into the Latin alphabet will be misleading to those English speakers without knowledge of Chinese. That's the nature of Romanization.   The Wade-Giles system used apostrophes and diacritic marks which were most often simply ignored in general English-language newspapers, further obscuring things.  At least Pinyin makes only a very limited use of diacritics.  You can see a large number of transcriptions of Sun Yat-sen's name on his Wikipedia article.  The conventional Romanization of Sun Yat-sen's name in English hasn't been updated because his life is not viewed as a PRC-relevant topic among English speakers, presumably... AnonMoos (talk) 05:08, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree, and I'm not complaining about Pinyin being misleading to English speakers at first glance – it wasn't primarily intended for them in the first place. I'm complaining about lazy Western jounalists (who are supposed to do research) failing to grasp how Pinyin works and themselves misleading the public by pronouncing Pinyin letters with inappropriate English sounds. Incidentally, I am English myself, and have completely forgotten what Cantonese I learned as a small child in Hong Kong. -- 09:46, 16 June 2023 46.65.228.117
 * Pinyin would be Sun Yixian. "Sun Yat-sen", like "Chiang Kai-shek" (Pinyin: Jiang Jieshi) is not romanised Mandarin, but romanised Cantonese. —Kusma (talk) 07:51, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
 * So OP is asking why "Sun Yat-sen" is not rendered as "Sun Yixian". In Pinyin-written MSM it doubtless is; in Western media this would not be recognised, and is not used, for example, as the title of his en-Wikipedia's article (though it redirects to it)  because of WP:COMMONNAME. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 46.65.228.117 (talk) 09:46, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
 * We use a variety of non-Pinyin romanisations and variants for people from Greater China: Shiing-Shen Chern, Ma Ying-jeou (these are Gwoyeu Romatzyh romanisations of Mandarin, one in Western name order, one in Chinese name order), Chiang Ching-kuo (Wade-Giles), Lee Hsien Loong (no idea what system this is supposed to be) etc. etc. This looks inconsistent, but follows the practice of mainstream media and WP:COMMONNAME applies here; you will only see everything transliterated into Pinyin if the target audience is expected to be able to read some Chinese characters (high quality scholarly sources sometimes do this). —Kusma (talk) 10:17, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Pinyin transcriptions in scholarly sources may also indicate tones, as in Sūn Yìxiān. --Lambiam 19:09, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Kusma -- For a long time, people in the U.S. at least did not mainly encounter the Chinese language in its Mandarin version. The main trading ports were Canton and Shanghai, and for many years most immigrants to the U.S. came from the four counties and the three counties in South China... AnonMoos (talk) 19:33, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Similarly in the UK, where Chinese immigrants generally came from British Hong Kong and its hinterland. Alansplodge (talk) 15:20, 17 June 2023 (UTC)
 * Pinyin uses (for the most part; including b and j) the same letters for consonants that Gwoyeu Romatzyh and Sin Wenz had used throughout the 20th century; they are not an invention from the 1950s. 213.137.65.242 (talk) 18:52, 16 June 2023 (UTC)
 * We got a whole WP:PINYIN about this. Folly Mox (talk) 06:47, 17 June 2023 (UTC)