Writing Foreign Words

There are always difficulties when you try and write a foreign word in your own language. Most languages don't bother to use the same set of sounds as each other, so you can not always (or even often) get an exact match to the sounds in your language. There are a number of ways around this; European languages don't really have this problem since they all use the same alphabet, you just have to learn how the combinations of letters are pronounced in one language or another; and there are varying degrees of success with Romanising other languages.

For those of you not familiar with Chinese, the written language is made up of a set of ideograms. Each character is one syllable, and often has a handful of different meanings. Most words in Chinese are 1-4 characters; sometimes they are fairly logical combinations, and sometimes they seem to mean completely different things when used together than when used on their own.

Furthermore, there is no clue in the characters themselves as to how they are pronounced. You simply have to know. Not all Chinese people know how to pronounce all the characters, either; if they see an unfamiliar character, they will have to look it up in a dictionary to see how to pronounce it. Many different characters share the same pronunciation, and differ only in tone; many characters share the exact same pronunciation, including tone. For example, the pronunciation "shi" is shared by about 158 different characters; "shi" with a lowering then rising tone is sAll of thihared by about 10.

This means there isn't really a way to convert Chinese characters to Roman characters; you can, however, translate Chinese speech to Roman characters by making a set of rule for how those characters should be pronounced. These rules are important, as Chinese has a completely different set of sounds from English. A good set of rules is the now-standard pinyin; a bad set of rules is Wade-Gillies. Pinyin is consistent and once you know the rules of pronunciation, matches Chinese speech quite closely. You have to get out of the habit of speaking the English characters as English, though; "x" and "q" in particular are pronounced very differently (q always trips me up, especially in words like "quan").

However, it only matches Hanyu (Mandarin). None of the other Chinese languages have standard Romanisations. They do all use the same set of characters, though, so two Chinese people who speak different languages won't understand each other while speaking, but they will be able to write to each other.

So much for writing Chinese using English letters. How about writing English using Chinese characters?

Well, it happens in much the same way. There is no consistent system for it; people will just pick characters that sound most like the English word in question, with no regard for what those characters mean in Chinese.

To illustrate, here is a little story from when Ariel and I were in a park on Monday:

We had been walking for a while, and had finally spied a free bench to sit down on. No sooner had we sat, however, than we were accosted by a sideshow operator wanting us to try his game. We declined, but a short moment later he asked me to record his spiel in English - he spoke no English, Ariel was translating as necessary. I complied, since he was a pretty nice guy, really. Then, he wrote down the English words so he could say them himself, with both Ariel and me repeating the words so he could get the sound right. This is where it gets funny, because he was writing the English using Chinese characters.

I can't read Chinese at all, but Ariel told me later that he had been using mostly words from the kitchen - so the first line - "one ball, one pen" - was written like so: 碗包碗盆. This translates roughly as: cup dumpling cup basin.

The end.

Some words in English are pretty much impossible to write in Chinese characters (at least with Mandarin pronunciation - I don't know much about the other Chinese languages). Chinese doesn't have any final consonants, for example, so even a simple word like "pet" becomes something more like "peta" when written in Chinese. These habits stay with Chinese people speaking English, too, so it is very difficult for Chinese people to get out of the habit of either adding a vowel to the end of every word, or leaving the final consonant off entirely. Even the other (local, not foreign) teachers at school do it. Consonant clusters, even in the middle of words, are difficult for the same reason. Also, there is no sound even approximating "v" in Chinese, so guess which letter is the hardest for the kids to pronounce...