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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Replying to @arthur_affect @SpaceKujira
I thought it might be something like that (historically Latinized names coming from the need to decline nouns), but I'm less familiar with Sino-Tibetan languages and prestige dialects
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Replying to @AmeliaRoseWrite @SpaceKujira
The real difference here is that China ended up with a logographic rather than alphabetic language So script ("spelling") and spoken language are far more detached from each other, and it's possible for everyone to read and write the same language pronounced totally differently
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Which led to a lot of historical weirdness, like what happened when Japan just adopted hanzi (kanji) wholesale even though Japanese isn't even *related* to Chinese, at all It's like a Monty Python joke (it's spelled "Luxury Yacht" but pronounced "Throatwobbler Mangrove")
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But like you can imagine that if the Latin alphabet didn't have letters correspond to specific sounds, "spelling" could've been "frozen" a lot longer and more dramatically "It's spelled 'Iacobus' but it's pronounced 'Jimmy'"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SpaceKujira
Given that English spellings are dependent on outdated pronunciations and borrowings from other languages/orthographies, though, it's not a big leap to make
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Yeah it's sort of vaguely similar to absurdities in English orthography like the way we spell "debt" (it's a "silent b" that is only silent in this one particular word)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @SpaceKujira
That specific example isn't quite the best example of the natural evolution because the b was inserted in by a Latinist, but that itself also shows how confused people get about how to spell things
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when the kid was learning to read, they gave out lists of "red words" and "green words", the former being the unspellable nonsense you can start english with a few hundred words! and the most used and necessary ones might as well be pictograms "one", wtf
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