[ih] Another history question -- Tiananmen Square

[Larry Sheldon]

On 6/6/2013 5:56 AM, John Day wrote:
> 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)
>
>


-- 
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)