Nice to have a quick and dirty pronunciation guide for this.
Interesting how useless transliteration can be unless the reader is familiar with the system. Naiively applying conventional pronunciation rules to transliterated words can yield mixed results.
Russian is kind of similar, though not as extreme as Mandarin. For example, most English speakers pronounce Khrushchev as "kroosh-chev" because that's how it reads if you're used to English spelling rules. But a more accurate (though still wrong) pronunciation would be more like "Hrooshoff" with a phlegm on the H and a rolled R if you can do it.
But getting to that pronunciation in the first place requires knowing that kh is Х, that shch is щ, and that the e is actually a ё (which is a separate letter from е in Russian, but the dots are frequently omitted because speakers of the language know which е's are е's and which are ё).
I've always wondered why the Romanized transliteration of Mandarin doesn't map normally to conventions used in the Latin letter-using world. For whom was it designed, then? This makes no more sense than Sinofying English by using Chinese characters to somehow represent different sounds than they normally would to a Mandarin speaker.
It actually does... but not to any one of them. It uses bits from different conventions, since no single convention is a good fit (none have all the required sounds). Besides, they all disagree with each other anyway.
Q is from Albanian, for example.
R is from Czech. Another romanization (Wade-Giles) uses J for that sound (taking it from French). Neither is a perfect match (the voiced retroflex r in Czech and the voiced fricative j in French are, ideally, not quite the same sounds) plus it can be realized in different ways by native Mandarin speakers but it's close enough.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadInteresting how useless transliteration can be unless the reader is familiar with the system. Naiively applying conventional pronunciation rules to transliterated words can yield mixed results.
Russian is kind of similar, though not as extreme as Mandarin. For example, most English speakers pronounce Khrushchev as "kroosh-chev" because that's how it reads if you're used to English spelling rules. But a more accurate (though still wrong) pronunciation would be more like "Hrooshoff" with a phlegm on the H and a rolled R if you can do it.
But getting to that pronunciation in the first place requires knowing that kh is Х, that shch is щ, and that the e is actually a ё (which is a separate letter from е in Russian, but the dots are frequently omitted because speakers of the language know which е's are е's and which are ё).
The one that really irks me is Potemkin!
Q is from Albanian, for example.
R is from Czech. Another romanization (Wade-Giles) uses J for that sound (taking it from French). Neither is a perfect match (the voiced retroflex r in Czech and the voiced fricative j in French are, ideally, not quite the same sounds) plus it can be realized in different ways by native Mandarin speakers but it's close enough.
I think pinyin is bloody brilliant.