[ih] Another history question -- Tiananmen Square

[Larry Sheldon]

Sorry about the content-free (even by my standards).  Not clear how that
happened.

I'm not even sure yet who it went to--I was trying to fix the addressing.

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.

I knew that and should have cut T-bird some slack.

> 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.

Some of that I knew, but forgot I knew it.

> 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.

It is good to learn or be reminded of what has supposedly been learned.

> Take care, John

Ask questions of learned and therefor interesting people is a hoot--you 
never know where you will end up.

Thanks.

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