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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!genrad!grkermit!chris
From: chris@grkermit.UUCP (Chris Hibbert)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Chinese<==>English transliteration
Message-ID: <663@grkermit.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Sep-83 12:46:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: grkermit.663
Posted: Wed Sep 21 12:46:20 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 21-Sep-83 23:56:43 EDT
Organization: GenRad Inc., Concord, MA
Lines: 23

Something that has bothered me for some time, starting when all the
newspapers and magazines switched transliteration systems a few years
ago:  How are we supposed to pronounce the chinese names and words that
we read?  The switch from "Peiking" to "Beijing" for the spelling (in
English) of the name of the capital city was accompanied by much
hoopla, and I even remember seeing a long list of the equivalent terms
under the old and new systems.  The thing that struck me most was that
the two systems never came up with the same spellings, and so I no
longer had any guide as to how the words were probably supposed to be
pronounced.

The change was apparently made to give us a more consistent system, but
no one ever explained how to pronounce the resultant words.  Are the
words to be pronounced the way they would if they were American
English?  (Whatever that is.)  Or is it the case (as seems much more
likely) that the new system is supposed to be completely internally
consistent, but only externally consistent with Spanish or Japanese or
even something like Esperanto?

What I'm looking for is some kind of a guide indicating what letters in
the transcriptions correspond to what sounds.  Does anyone know what the
correspondence is?