Somehow kind of guessed this based on Taiwanese and Hong Kongers and SE Asian Chinese sometimes seeming to have different patterns of Romanized names, never saw it written out before. Good to see a proper explanation.
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Replying to @SpaceKujira @arthur_affect
Same. I have a very general sense that East and Southeast Asian names seem different but lack any proper context to trace it, so this is a good launch point!
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Replying to @AmeliaRoseWrite @SpaceKujira
Yeah there's this viral NYT article from the 2000s about how the NYT's (and most US pubs') style guide for transliterating "Chinese names" as a whole bows to Mandarin cultural imperialism It gave the example of a random guy quoted in some NYT story as "Mr. Wu"
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Pointing out that, yes, this is technically correct, because his name is written in hanzi as 吳, and in Mandarin that's pronounced "Wu" But Mr. Wu, a working-class bus driver from Guangzhou, most likely *never* called himself "Wu" in daily conversation
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And his ancestors, for the vast majority of their family history, wouldn't have called themselves "Wu" either Because as a South Chinese family from Guangdong their actual native language was Cantonese, in which 吳 is pronounced "Ng"
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It's a difficult situation to translate into Western terms in modern times But it's like all these old-timey historical figures referred to only by their Latin names, names they'd never have used in conversation
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There is no "Christopher Columbus", there was a Cristoforo Columbo from the Republic of Genoa who later went by Cristóbal Colón when he became a Spanish subject There was no "Nicolaus Copernicus", there was a Polish guy named Mikołaj Kopernik Etc.
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And this isn't a neutral topic, this is a highly politicized topic The NYT style guide tells us to, for instance, use the "Mandarin names" of Hong Kong independence protesters who explicitly do not speak Mandarin and who view the imposition of Mandarin as a cultural attack
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It is a very *difficult* topic, especially for a foreigner and cultural outsider The question of whether the different "dialects" of Chinese are different languages and whether freely "translating" them into Mandarin is offensive or is a cultural necessity is political
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And you're likely to find many different opinions about it within a community or within a family The question of whether it's imperialism for Mandarin to be the official language of Taiwan (or what to even call Taiwan as a political entity) is a live wire among my relatives
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But it is very telling that American institutions have just defaulted to the idea that the "neutral" stance isn't actually neutral, it's the one that gives the Chinese government everything they want
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