Transcription into Chinese characters

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Transcription
Names of the World's Peoples.jpg
Front cover of the official transcription guide, Names of the World's Peoples: A Comprehensive Dictionary of Names in Roman-Chinese.

Transcription into Chinese characters is the use of traditional or simplified Chinese characters to phonetically transcribe the sound of terms and names of foreign words to the Chinese language. Transcription is distinct from translation into Chinese whereby the meaning of a foreign word is communicated in Chinese. Since, in mainland China and often in Taiwan, Hanyu Pinyin is now used to transcribe Chinese into a modified Latin alphabet and since English classes are now standard in most secondary schools, it is increasingly common to see foreign names and terms left in their original form in Chinese texts. However, for mass media and marketing within China and for non-European languages, particularly those of the Chinese minorities, transcription into characters remains very common.

Contents

Despite the importance of Cantonese and other southern coastal varieties of Chinese to foreign contact during the 19th century (as seen, for instance, in the number of Cantonese loanwords in English), the northern capital dialect has been formally sanctioned within the country for centuries. This status continued under the Republic, which retained the importance of the "National Language" (國語Guóyǔ) despite moving its capital to Nanjing, Chongqing, and Taipei, none of which natively spoke it. Similarly, "Standard Chinese" (普通话Pǔtōnghuà) has been mandatory for most media and education throughout the People's Republic of China since 1956. [1] [2] Except for a handful of traditional exceptions, modern transcription therefore uses the standardized Mandarin pronunciations exclusively.

Official standards

Modern Han Chinese consists of about 412 syllables [3] in 5 tones, so homophones abound and most non-Han words have multiple possible transcriptions. This is particularly true since Chinese is written as monosyllabic logograms, and consonant clusters foreign to Chinese must be broken into their constituent sounds (or omitted), despite being thought of as a single unit in their original language. Since there are so many characters to choose from when transcribing a word, a translator can manipulate the transcription to add additional meaning. As an example, for the syllable , there is a choice of some 120 characters that have this as a Hanyu Pinyin reading.

In the People's Republic of China, the process has been standardized by the Proper Names and Translation Service of the state-run Xinhua News Agency. Xinhua publishes an official reference guide, the Names of the World's Peoples: a Comprehensive Dictionary of Names in Roman-Chinese (世界人名翻译大辞典Shìjiè Rénmíng Fānyì Dà Cídiǎn), which controls most transcription for official media and publication in mainland China. As the name implies, the work consists of a dictionary of common names. It also includes transcription tables for names and terms which are not included. The English table is reproduced below; those for a number of other languages are available on the Chinese Wikipedia.

The Basic Laws of the Hong Kong (article) and Macau (article) Special Administrative Regions provide that "Chinese" will be the official languages of those territories, in addition to English and Portuguese, respectively, leaving ambiguous the relative preference for Cantonese and Mandarin. In practice, transcriptions based on both Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations have been used.

In Singapore, transcription standards are established by the Translation Standardisation Committee for the Chinese Media and in 2014 was moved to National Translation Committee (NTC) of the Ministry of Communication and Information. In Malaysia, transcription/translation standards are established by Chinese Language Standardisation Council of Malaysia.

Increasingly, other countries are setting their own official standards for Chinese transcription and do not necessarily follow Xinhua's versions, just as Xinhua's version differs from Wade–Giles and other international standards. For example, the United States embassy in China recommends rendering "Obama" as 欧巴马Ōubāmǎ, while Xinhua uses 奥巴马Àobāmǎ. [4]

History

Transcription of foreign terms may date to the earliest surviving written records in China, the Shang oracle bones. As the Huaxia spread from their initial settlements near the confluence of the Wei and Yellow rivers, they were surrounded on all sides by other peoples. The Chinese characters developed to describe them may have originally transcribed local names, such as the proposed connection between the original "Eastern Yi" people (東夷) and an Austroasiatic word for "sea". [5] However, the tendency within China was to fit new groups into the existing structure, so that, for example, "Yi" eventually became a word for any "barbarian" and the name "Yue" ( & ), originally applied to a people northwest of the Shang, [6] was later applied to a people south of the Yangtze and then to many cultures as far south as Vietnam. Interaction with the states of Chu, Wu, and Yue during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods of the later Zhou brings the first certain evidence of transcription: most famously, the word jiāng (), originally krong, [7] derives from the Austroasiatic word for "river". [8]

Besides proper names, a small number of loanwords also found their way into Chinese during the Han dynasty after Zhang Qian's exploration of the Western Regions. [9] The Western Han also saw Liu Xiang's transcription and translation of the "Song of the Yue Boatman" in his Garden of Stories . Some scholars have tried to use it to reconstruct an original version of the otherwise unrecorded language of the Yangtze's Yue people before their incorporation into the Han. [10]

The expansion of Buddhism within China during the later Han and Three Kingdoms period required the transcription of a great many Sanskrit and Pali terms. According to the Song-era scholar Zhou Dunyi, [11] the monk and translator Xuanzang (of Journey to the West fame) handed down guidelines of "Five Kinds of Words Not to Translate" (simplified Chinese:五种不翻; traditional Chinese:五種不翻). He directed that transcription should be used instead of translation when the words are:

  1. Arcane, such as incantations
  2. Polysemous
  3. Not found in China
  4. Traditionally transcribed, not translated
  5. Lofty and subtle, which a translation might devalue or obscure

These ancient transcription into Chinese characters provide clues to the reconstruction of Middle Chinese. In historical Chinese phonology, this information is called duìyīn (simplified Chinese:对音; traditional Chinese:對音; lit.'corresponding sounds'); in Western Sinology, Baron Alexander von Staël-Holstein was the first to emphasize its importance in reconstructing the sounds of Middle Chinese. The transcriptions made during the Tang dynasty are particularly valuable, as the then-popular Tantra sect required its mantras to be rendered very carefully into Chinese characters, since they were thought to lose their efficacy if their exact sounds were not properly uttered.

The History of Liao contains a list of Khitan words phonetically transcribed with Chinese characters. The History of Jin contains a list of Jurchen words phonetically transcribed with Chinese characters. [12] [13] In the History of Yuan, Mongol names were phonetically transcribed in Chinese characters.

In the Ming dynasty, the Chinese government's Bureau of Translators (四夷馆Sìyí Guǎn) and the Bureau of Interpreters (会同馆Huìtóng Guǎn) published bilingual dictionaries/vocabularies of foreign languages like the Bureau of Translators' multilingual dictionary (华夷译语Huá-Yí yìyǔ, 'Sino-Barbarian Dictionary'), using Chinese characters to phonetically transcribe the words of the foreign languages such as Jurchen, Korean, Japanese, Ryukyuan, Mongolian, Old Uyghur, Vietnamese, Cham, Dai, Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Persian, [14] [15] Tibetan, Malay, Javanese, Acehnese, and Sanskrit.

During the Qing dynasty some bilingual Chinese-Manchu dictionaries had the Manchu words phonetically transcribed with Chinese characters. The book 御製增訂清文鑑 ("Imperially-Published Revised and Enlarged mirror of Qing") in Manchu and Chinese, used both Manchu script to transcribe Chinese words and Chinese characters to transcribe Manchu words with fanqie. [16]

As part of the promotion of Kaozheng studies in the philological field, Qianlong decided that the Chinese character transcriptions of names and words of the Khitan language in the History of Liao, the Jurchen language in the History of Jin, and the Mongolian language in the History of Yuan were not phonetically accurate and true to the original pronunciation. The histories were in fact hastily compiled and suffered from inaccurate and inconsistent phonetic transcriptions of the same names. He ordered the "Imperial Liao Jin Yuan Three Histories National Language Explanation" (欽定遼金元三史國語解Qīndìng Liáo Jīn Yuán sān shǐ guóyǔjiě [17] [18] [19] ) project to "correct" the Chinese character transcriptions by referring to the contemporaneous descendants of those languages. Qianlong identified the Solon language with the Khitan, the Manchu language with the Jurchen, and the Mongolian language with the Mongolian. [20] Solon, Mongolian, and Manchu speakers were consulted with on the "correct" pronunciations of the names and words and their Chinese transcriptions were accordingly changed. However the Khitan language has now been found by modern linguists to be a Mongolic language and is unrelated to the Solon language. The project was part of the Siku Quanshu. Qianlong also promulgated a theory that the Daur people were descended from a Khitan clan, changing the Khitan clan name 大賀Dàhè, found in the History of Liao, to 達呼爾Dáhū'ěr. The Chinese transcription of the Manchu clan name Niohuru 鈕祜祿 (Niǔhùlù) was edited and inserted in place of the Jurchen clan name 女奚烈 (Nǚxīliè). [21]

"2. A learned committee, consisting of Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, western Mohammedans, etc. was appointed by the emperor K'ien-lung to revise the Yüan shi, and especially the foreign names of men, places etc. occurring so frequently in that book. These savants in their reformatory zeal, proceeded on the idea, that all the proper names had been incorrectly rendered in the official documents of the Mongols, and had to be changed. They pronounced the same verdict with respect to the histories of the Liao and the Kin. Thus in the new editions of the histories of the Liao, Kin and Yüan, all the original proper names without exception disappeared, and were replaced by names of a new invention, which generally have little resemblance to the original. For further particulars, compare my Notes on Chinese Mediaeval Travellers, p. 58, note 1. By this way of corrupting the names of the original historios, which have generally rendered foreign sounds as correctly as the Chinese language permits, the K'ien-lung editions of these works have become completely unserviceable for historical and geographical investigations. K'ien-lung was very proud of the happy idea of metamorphosing the ancient proper names, and issued an edict, that in future no Chinese scholar should dare to use the ancient names.

After the three histories had been corrupted, K'ien-lung ordered the same committee to explain the meanings of the new names; and this gave rise to a new work entitled: 遼金元史語解 Liao kin yüan shi yü kai, or "Explanation of words (proper names) found in the histories of the Liao, Kin and Yüan." In this vocabulary, all the names of men, countries, places, mountains, rivers etc.—of the three histories have been systematically arranged, but according to the new spelling. The original spelling of the name however is always given, and the chapters are indicated where the name occurs. This renders the vocabulary very useful for reference, and we may lay aside the fact, that the principal object in view of the learned committee, was the absurd explanation of the meaning of the newly-invented names. I may give a few examples of the sagacity these savants displayed in their etymological commentaries. The city of Derbend (the name means "gate" in Persian), situated on the western shore of the Caspian sea, is mentioned in the Yuan shi, as a city of Persia, and the name is written 打耳班 Da-r-ban. The committee changed the name into 都爾本 Du-r-ben, and explain that durben in Mongol means, "four." The name of Bardaa, a city of Armenia, is rendered in the original Yuan shi by 巴耳打阿 Ba-r-da-a. The committee will have the name to be 巴勒塔哈 Ba-le-t'a-ha, and comment that this name in Manchu means "the neck part of a sable skin." By 别失八里 Bie-shi-ba-li in theuncorrupted Yuan shi, Bishbalik is to be understood. The meaning of this name in Turkish, is " Five cities," and the term 五城 Wu-ch'eng, meaning also "Five cities," occurs repeatedly in the Yuan shi, as a synonym of Bie-shi-ba-li. The committee however transformed the name into 巴實伯里 Ba-shi-bo-li, and state that Ba-shi in the language of the Mohammedans means "head" and bo-li "kidneys."

The most recent edition of the Yüan shi (also with corrupted proper names) is dated 1824, but Archimandrite Palladius has noticed that it was only finished about twenty years later. This edition is not difficult of purchase, and I fancy it is the only edition of the Yuan shi found in European libraries. The numerous translations from the "Mongol history," found in Pauthier's M. Polo, have all been made from this corrupted text. At the time Klaproth and Rémusat wrote, the Yuan shi was unknown in Europe, and it seems, that even the old Catholic missionaries in Peking had not seen it. The old sinologues knew only an extract of the great "Mongol History"." - E. Bretschneider, Notices of the Mediæval Geography and History of Central and Western Asia, pp. 5-6. [22] [23] [24]

Marshall Broomhall commented that Though a great soldier and a great litterateur, K'ien-lung did not escape some serious errors. At one time he appointed a learned committee of Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, and Western Mohammedans to revise the foreign names of men and places which occur in the Yüan Records. So unscientific was this work that the K'ien-lung editions of the Liao, Kin, and Yüan histories are practically useless. The title Kalif rendered Ha-li-fu was changed by the Committee into Farkha and is explained as being "a village in Manchuria." [25]

Transcriptions of English in Chinese characters were used in a book to learn English dating to 1860 in the reign of the Xianfeng Emperor. [26] During the late 19th century, when Western ideas and products flooded China, transcriptions mushroomed. They include not only transcriptions of proper nouns but also those of common nouns for new products. [27] [28] The influence was particularly marked in dialects near the major ports, like Shanghainese. Many of these phonemic loans proved to be fads, however, and popular usage and linguistic reformers subsequently favored calques or neologisms in their place.

Sound and meaning

A transcription into Chinese characters can sometimes be a phono-semantic matching, i.e. it reflects both the sound and the meaning of the transcribed word. For example, "Modern Standard Chinese 声纳shēngnà "sonar", uses the characters shēng "sound" and "receive, accept". shēng is a phonetically imperfect rendering of the English initial syllable. Chinese has a large number of homo/heterotonal homophonous morphemes, which would have been much better phonetically (but not nearly as good semantically)  consider the syllable song (cf. sòng 'deliver, carry, give (as a present)', sōng 'pine; loose, slack', sǒng 'tower; alarm, attract' etc.), sou (cf. sōu 'search', sǒu 'old man', sōu 'sour, spoiled' and many others) or shou (cf. shōu 'receive, accept', shòu 'receive, accept', shǒu 'hand', shǒu 'head', shòu 'beast', shòu 'thin' and so forth)." [29]

Belarus (lit. "White Russia") is transcribed in Chinese as 白俄罗斯Bái'éluósī, with bái ("white") and 俄罗斯Éluósī ("Russia") preserving the meaning of the original name. Similarly, the common ending -va in Russian female surnames is usually transcribed as , meaning "baby" or "girl", and the corresponding masculine suffix -[o]v is rendered as , meaning "man". In literary translations, Utopia was famously transcribed by Yan Fu as 烏托邦/乌托邦Wūtuōbāng ("unfounded country") and Pantagruel was written as 龐大固埃/庞大固埃Pángdàgù'āi, from 龐大/庞大 ("gigantic") and ("solid", "hefty"). More recently, one translation of World Wide Web is 萬維網/万维网Wànwéi Wǎng, meaning "myriad-dimensional net". Sometimes the transcription reflects chengyu or other Chinese sayings and idioms. For example, the Beatles are known in Mainland China as 披頭士/披头士Pītóushì, "the mop-headed", and in Taiwan and Hong Kong, 披頭四/披头四Pītóusì, "the mop-head four", reflecting the chengyu 披頭散髮/披头散发pītóu sànfǎ concerning disheveled hair. They can also reflect subjective opinions or advertising. Esperanto, now known as "the international language" or literally "language of the world" (世界語/世界语Shìjièyǔ), was first introduced to China as 愛斯不難讀/爱斯不难读Àisībùnándú, meaning "[We] love this [because it's] not difficult to read".

Given that a Chinese neologism can be a phono-semantic matching (i.e. in accordance with both the meaning and the sound of the foreign lexical item), an "innocent" transcription may be unwittingly interpreted as reflecting the meaning of the original. During the Qing dynasty, some Chinese scholars were unhappy to find China was located on a continent called 亞細亞/亚细亚Yàxìyà, i.e. Asia, as / means "secondary" and / "small", believing that the Europeans were deliberately belittling the East. [30] The ancient Japanese, or the Wa people were upset by their name being represented by the character ("small, short, servile") by the Chinese, and replaced it with ("peace, harmony"). [31] Modern Africans have accused the Chinese of racism, as "Africa" is written as 非洲 Fēizhōu ("negative, wrong continent") in Chinese. [32] Whether these accusations were justified is controversial.

Cultural differences and personal preference about negative meaning is subjective. However, some translations are generally held to be inappropriate and are usually not used in today's transcriptions:

Sign for the Avenida do Conselheiro Ferreira de Almeida. Avenida do Conselheiro Ferreira de Almeida.png
Sign for the Avenida do Conselheiro Ferreira de Almeida.

According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, phono-semantic matching in Chinese is common in four semantic domains: brand names, computer jargon, technological terms and toponyms. [33]

Some transcriptions are meant to have, or happen to have, positive connotations:

Foreign companies are able to choose representations of their names which serve advertising purposes:

Regional differences

Mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia use simplified characters in its transcriptions, while Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau typically use traditional characters. In addition, transcriptions used in Chinese speaking regions sometimes differ from official transcriptions. For example "Hawaii" (哈瓦伊Hāwǎyī) is rendered as 夏威夷Xiàwēiyí in most Chinese-language media while New Zealand (新西兰Xīnxīlán) is transcribed by Taiwan media as 紐西蘭Niǔxīlán.

In general, mainland China tends to preserve the pronunciation of names deriving from their language of origin while Taiwan often transcribes them according to the English pronunciation. For example, the Russian President Vladimir Putin is known as 普京Pǔjīng in mainland sources after the native Russian pronunciation [ˈputʲɪn], whereas the name is rendered as 普丁Pǔdīng in Taiwan. Hong Kong and Macau, meanwhile, formerly transcribed names using their Cantonese pronunciations, although that practice has become less common following their handovers. Chinese transcriptions are now frequently cribbed from the mainland, even if the local pronunciation then becomes more remote from the original. [36] For example, Cantonese sources copy the mainland transcription 普京, despite its local pronunciation being the rather infelicitous Póugīng.

In 2016, a controversy arose in Hong Kong when protestors petitioned Nintendo to reverse its decision of converting the Hong Kong names of over 100 Pokémon into the mainland Chinese equivalents of their names, including its most famous character Pikachu. In the first half of 2016, Nintendo announced that it would change Pikachu's name from its original Cantonese name, Béikāchīu比卡超, to Pèihkāyāu in favor of fitting the Mandarin pronunciation, Píkǎqiū皮卡丘, in the most recent series of Pokémon games, Pokémon Sun and Moon, [37] in order to standardize marketing in the Greater China region. [38]

Regional transcriptions into Chinese
Mainland China, Singapore and MalaysiaHong Kong and MacauTaiwan
Hitler 希特勒(Xītèlè)希特拉(Hēidahklāai)希特勒(Xītèlè)
Clinton 克林顿(Kèlíndùn)克林頓(Hāaklàhmdeuhn)柯林頓(Kēlíndùn)
Bush 布什(Bùshí)布殊(Bousyùh)布希(Bùxī)
Obama 奥巴马(Àobāmǎ)奧巴馬(Oubāmáh)歐巴馬(Ōubāmǎ)
Sydney 悉尼(Xīní)悉尼(Sīknèih)雪梨(Xuělí)
Donald Trump 唐纳德(Tángnàdé)·特朗普(Tèlǎngpǔ)當勞(Dōnglòuh)·特朗普(Dahklóhngpóu)唐納(Tángnà)·川普(Chuānpǔ)

Even though Malaysia had their official transliteration names for ministers and currency unit (Malaysian Ringgit), China did not accept those transliterations and proceed to use their own transliterations. For Malay names, transliterations usually uses their pronunciation to transliterate into Chinese characters instead of their appeared romanization (e.g. Xinhua's translation usually transliterate letter by letter instead of following their pronunciation).

Transcription table

The table below is the English-into-Chinese transcription table from Xinhua's Names of the World's Peoples. This table uses the International Phonetic Alphabet for English vowels (rows) and consonants (columns).

Transcription from English (IPA) into Chinese
b p d t ɡ k v w f z , dz ts s , ð , θ ʒ ʃ h m n l r j ɡʷ
() () () () () () ()( ()) ()( ()) ()( ()) () () ()( ()) () (shí) () () () () (ēn) (ěr) (ěr) () () () ()
ɑː , æ , ʌ (ā) () () () () (jiā) () ()( ()) ()( ()) ()( ()) (zhā) (chá) ()( (shā)) (zhā) (shā)( (shā)) (jiǎ) (chá) () ()( ()) ()( ()) () () ()( ()) (guā) (kuā) (huá)
ɛ , (āi) (bèi) (pèi) () ()/ (tài) (gài) (kǎi) (wéi) (wéi) (fèi) () () (sài) () (xiè) (jié) (qiè) ()/ (hēi) (méi) (nèi) (lái) (léi)( (lěi)) () (guī) (kuí) (huì)
ɜ , ə (è) () () () () () () () () () () () () () (shè) (zhé) (chè) () () ()( ()) () () () (guǒ) (kuò) (huò)
, ɪ () () () () () () () (wéi) (wēi) (fēi) () () 西 () () () () () () () ()( ()) ()( ()) ()( ()) () (guī) (kuí) (huì)
ɒ , ɔː , (ào) () () (duō) (tuō) () () () () () (zuǒ) (cuò) (suǒ) (ruò) (xiāo) (qiáo) (qiáo) (huò) () (nuò) (luò) (luó)( (luó)) (yuē) (guǒ) (kuò) (huò)
, ʊ () () () () () () () () () () () (chǔ) () () (shū) (zhū) (chǔ) () () () () () (yóu) ()
juː, (yóu) (bǐyóu) (píyóu) (díyóu) (dìyóu) (jiǔ) (qiū) (wéiyóu) (wēiyóu) (fēiyóu) (jiǔ) (qiū) (xiū) (xiū) (jiǔ) (qiū) (xiū) (miù) (niǔ) (liǔ) (liú)
(ài) (bài) (pài) (dài)( (dài)) (tài) (gài) (kǎi) (wéi) 怀 (huái) () (zǎi) (cài) (sài) (xià) (jiǎ) (chái) (hǎi) (mài) (nài) (lái) (lài) () (guāyī) (kuā) 怀 (huái)
(ào) (bào) (bǎo) (dào) (táo) (gāo) (kǎo) () () () (zǎo) (cáo) (shào) (shào) (jiāo) (qiáo) (háo) (máo) (nǎo) (láo) (láo) (yáo) (kuò)
æn, ʌn, æŋ (ān) (bān) (pān) (dān) (tǎn) (gān) (kǎn) (wàn) (wàn) (fán) (zàn) (càn) (sāng) (shàng) (zhān) (qián) (hàn) (màn) (nán) (lán) (lán) (yáng) (guān) (kuān) (huán)
ɑn, aʊn, ʌŋ, ɔn, ɒn, ɒŋ (áng) (bāng) (páng) (dāng) (táng) (gāng) (kāng) (wàng) (wàng) (fāng) (zàng) (cāng) (sāng) (ràng) (shàng) (zhāng) (chāng) (háng) (máng) (nán) (lǎng) (lǎng) (yáng) (guāng) (kuāng) (huáng)
ɛn, ɛŋ, ɜn, ən, əŋ (ēn) (běn) (péng) (dēng) (téng) (gēn) (kěn) (wén) (wén) (fēn) (zēng) (cén) (sēn) (rèn) (shēn) (zhēn) (qín) (hēng) (mén) (nèn) (lún) (lún) (yán) (gǔ'ēn) (kūn)
ɪn, in, ɪən, jən (yīn) (bīn) (píng) (dīng) (tíng) (jīn) (jīn) (wēn) (wēn) (fēn) (jīn) (xīn) (xīn) (xīn) (jīn) (qīn) (xīn) (míng) (níng) (lín)( (lín)) (lín)( (lín)) (yīn) (gǔyīn) (kūn)
ɪŋ (yīng) (bīn) (píng) (dīng) (tíng) (jīng) (jīn) (wēn) (wēn) (fēn) (jīng) (qīng) (xīn) (xìng) (jīng) (qīng) (xìng) (míng) (níng) (lín)( (lín)) (lín)( (lín)) (yīng) (gǔyīng)
un, ʊn, oʊn (wēn) (běn) (péng) (dūn) (tōng) (gòng) (kūn) (wén) (wén) (fēng) (zūn) (cōng) (sūn) (shùn) (zhǔn) (chūn) (hóng) (méng) (nóng) (lún) (lún) (yún)
ʊŋ (wēng) (bāng) (péng) (dōng) (tōng) (gòng) (kǒng) (wēng) (wēng) (fēng) (zōng) (cōng) (sōng) (róng) (xióng) (qióng) (qióng) (hóng) (méng) (nóng) (lóng) (lóng) (yǒng) (hóng)

Notes

Exceptions

Translating names

The characters now employed in standardized transcription tend to have abstract or obscure meanings and have fallen out of use, so that their phonetic use is apparent. Therefore, in many cases, the Chinese names non-Chinese people adopt for themselves are not those that are phonetically equivalent but are instead "adapted" from or "inspired" by (i.e., translations of) the original. See, for instance, the Chinese names of the Hong Kong governors.

New characters

Very rarely, characters are specially made for the transcribed terms. This was formerly more common: by adding the appropriate semantic radical, existing characters could be used to give a sense of the sound of the new word. , for instance, was formed out of (the water radical) + , which at the time had the sound value khong, [7] to approximate the Yue name *Krong. Similarly, the addition of (the grass radical) produced 茉莉mòlì to translate the Sanskrit name for jasmine (malli) and (clothes) was added to other characters to permit 袈裟jiāshā, the Chinese version of Sanskrit kasaya. Another such example is 乒乓pīngpāng the Chinese word for ping pong, in which both characters are formed by removing a stroke from the similar sounding character bīng, and at the same time, the two characters look like a net and a paddle. The most general radical for transcription is the mouth radical, which is used to transcribe not only certain foreign terms (such as 咖啡kāfēi, "coffee"), but also terms for which no Chinese characters exist in non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese (such as in Cantonese). Such phono-semantic compounds make up the majority of Chinese characters, but new ones coined to communicate foreign words only infrequently reach common use today. Notable exceptions are the Chinese characters for chemical elements, which mostly consist of combining pre-existing characters with the appropriate radicals, such as for gases.

See also

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chinese language</span> National language of China

Chinese is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or around 16% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.

Chinese surnames are used by Han Chinese and Sinicized ethnic groups in Greater China, Korea, Vietnam and among overseas Chinese communities around the world such as Singapore and Malaysia. Written Chinese names begin with surnames, unlike the Western tradition in which surnames are written last. Around 2,000 Han Chinese surnames are currently in use, but the great proportion of Han Chinese people use only a relatively small number of these surnames; 19 surnames are used by around half of the Han Chinese people, while 100 surnames are used by around 87% of the population. A report in 2019 gives the most common Chinese surnames as Wang and Li, each shared by over 100 million people in China. The remaining eight of the top ten most common Chinese surnames are Zhang, Liu, Chen, Yang, Huang, Zhao, Wu and Zhou.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jyutping</span> Romanization scheme for Cantonese

The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme, also known as Jyutping, is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed in 1993 by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK).

Fanqie is a method in traditional Chinese lexicography to indicate the pronunciation of a monosyllabic character by using two other characters, one with the same initial consonant as the desired syllable and one with the same rest of the syllable . The method was introduced in the 3rd century AD and is to some extent still used in commentaries on the classics and dictionaries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cantonese</span> Variety of Yue Chinese

Cantonese is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. It is the traditional prestige variety of the Yue Chinese group, which has over 82.4 million native speakers. While the term Cantonese specifically refers to the prestige variety, it is often used to refer to the entire Yue subgroup of Chinese, including related but partially mutually intelligible varieties like Taishanese.

The Hong Kong Government uses an unpublished system of Romanisation of Cantonese for public purposes which is based on the 1888 standard described by Roy T Cowles in 1914 as Standard Romanisation. The primary need for Romanisation of Cantonese by the Hong Kong Government is in the assigning of names to new streets and places. It has not formally or publicly disclosed its method for determining the appropriate Romanisation in any given instance.

Jurchen language was the Tungusic language of the Jurchen people of eastern Manchuria, the rulers of the Jin dynasty in northern China of the 12th and 13th centuries. It is ancestral to the Manchu language. In 1635 Hong Taiji renamed the Jurchen ethnicity and language to "Manchu".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Written Cantonese</span> Cantonese written tradition

Written Cantonese is the most complete written form of a Chinese language after that for Mandarin Chinese and Classical Chinese. Written Chinese was the main literary language of China until the 19th century. Written vernacular Chinese first appeared in the 17th century, and a written form of Mandarin became standard throughout China in the early 20th century. Cantonese is a common language in places like Hong Kong and Macau. While the Mandarin form can to some extent be read and spoken word for word in other Chinese varieties, its intelligibility to non-Mandarin speakers is poor to incomprehensible because of differences in idioms, grammar and usage. Modern Cantonese speakers have therefore developed new characters for words that do not exist and have retained others that have been lost in standard Chinese.

General Chinese is a diaphonemic orthography invented by Yuen Ren Chao to represent the pronunciations of all major varieties of Chinese simultaneously. It is "the most complete genuine Chinese diasystem yet published". It can also be used for the Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese pronunciations of Chinese characters, and challenges the claim that Chinese characters are required for interdialectal communication in written Chinese.

Sidney Lau romanisation is a system of romanisation for Cantonese that was developed in the 1970s by Sidney Lau for teaching Cantonese to Hong Kong Government expatriates. It is based on the Hong Kong Government's Standard Romanisation which was the result of the work of James D. Ball and Ernst J. Eitel about a century earlier.

Hong Kong Cantonese is a dialect of the Cantonese language of the Sino-Tibetan family.

The History of Yuan, also known as the Yuanshi, is one of the official Chinese historical works known as the Twenty-Four Histories of China. Commissioned by the court of the Ming dynasty, in accordance to political tradition, the text was composed in 1370 by the official Bureau of History of the Ming dynasty, under direction of Song Lian (1310–1381).

The History of Liao, or Liao Shi, is a Chinese historical book compiled officially by the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), under the direction of the historian Toqto'a (Tuotuo), and finalized in 1344. Based on Khitan's primary sources and other previous official Chinese records, it details the Khitan people, Khitan's tribal life and traditions, as well as the official histories of the Liao dynasty and its successor, the Western Liao dynasty.

Standard Cantonese pronunciation is that of Guangzhou, also known as Canton, capital of Guangdong Province. Hong Kong Cantonese is related to Guangzhou dialect, and they diverge only slightly. Yue dialects in other parts of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces like Taishanese, may be considered divergent to a greater degree.

Hokkien, a Southern Min variety of Chinese spoken in Southeastern China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, does not have a unitary standardized writing system, in comparison with the well-developed written forms of Cantonese and Vernacular Chinese (Mandarin). In Taiwan, a standard for Written Hokkien has been developed by the Republic of China Ministry of Education including its Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan, but there are a wide variety of different methods of writing in Vernacular Hokkien. Nevertheless, vernacular works written in Hokkien are still commonly seen in literature, film, performing arts and music.

When a foreign place name, or toponym, occurs in Chinese text, the problem arises of spelling it in Chinese characters, given the limited phonetics and restrictive phonology of Mandarin Chinese, and the possible meaning of those characters when treated as Chinese words. For example:

Orthographic transcription is a transcription method that employs the standard spelling system of each target language.

The History of Jin is a Chinese historical text, one of the Twenty Four Histories, which details the history of the Jin dynasty founded by the Jurchens in northern China. It was compiled by the Yuan dynasty historian and minister Toqto'a.

Cantonese Bopomofo, or Cantonese Phonetic Symbols is an extended set of Bopomofo characters used to transcribe Yue Chinese and, specifically, its prestige Cantonese dialect. It was first introduced in early 1930s, and then standardized in 1950. It fell into disuse along with the original Bopomofo for Mandarin Chinese in the late 1950s.

References

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Sources

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  • Names of the World's Peoples (世界人名翻译大辞典), published by the Xinhua News Agency, October 1993, ISBN   7500102216/Z21