[ih] Another history question -- Tiananmen Square

[John Day]

Tien-an-men or Tian-an-men is Westernized from Chinese and is 
multiple characters, not a single word.  Since Chinese characters are 
words, not letters there are multiple ways to translate them into 
Western characters.  Seldom will any of them cause a Westerner to 
produce the right sounds.

The old Wade-Giles approach produces vastly different Westernizations 
than the official PRC Pinyin.  For example, Mao Tse-tung in Wade 
Giles becomes Mao ZeDong in Pinyin, or Chou En-lai vs Zhou Enlai.

And of course, any one Westernization of a character will actually 
stand for multiple characters in Chinese and often not a small 
number.  It is interesting that previous Chinese dictionaries were 
organized by stroke count and/or radical.  The PRC started the 
practice of organizing the dictionary by the pinyin spelling.  It 
apparently produces a finer granularity hash. ;-)  There fewer times 
that 100s of characters end up under the same pinyin spelling 
convention.

But there is really no way to speak of misspellings with Chinese names.

Take care,
John



At 2:44 AM -0500 6/6/13, Larry Sheldon wrote:
>The other day I read a posting someplace about the anniversary of 
>the Tiananmen Square protests.
>
>While reading the article I mistakenly took something the author 
>said to mean that he (she) thought the Internet was involved.  (I 
>have since found it briefly and the author said nothing of the sort.)
>
>I said I thought that the technological enabler in those protests 
>was the PC-connected printer.
>
>But now I am worried that I am wrong about that too.  I do think I 
>remember reading that somewhere at the time--but I don't have a 
>notion now about how they passed data around.  Disks?  BBSs?
>
>Any of you folks who actually know have an opinion?
>
>It is interesting to note that Thunderbird seems to have "Tiananmen" 
>miss-spelt as "Tienanmen"
>--
>Requiescas in pace o email           Two identifying characteristics
>                                         of System Administrators:
>Ex turpi causa non oritur actio      Infallibility, and the ability to
>                                         learn from their mistakes.
>                                           (Adapted from Stephen Pinker)