Interesting threadhttps://twitter.com/tanchunkiet/status/1332566007995535361 …
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Replying to @AmeliaRoseWrite @arthur_affect
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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Notable also is how medieval church records would often Latin-ised everyone's names to Henricus or whatever but their daily use name is likely a dialectal diminutive of it
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True. And the hegemony that came from first the Roman Empire and later the Catholic church meant that Latin was the prestige language in Europe, so that was political, too
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My understanding of how classical written Chinese is used historically is very coloured by me being a medievalist, I confess. I often end up likening it to the relationship the various European cultures had to Latin.
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There's a lot of similarities, yeah Including how "classical Chinese" as we know it is a "high language" that for much of its history was used by scholars to communicate in writing, that they translated their actual daily vernacular into
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Replying to @arthur_affect @jeannette_ng and
So a lot of the stuff that makes a book like the Dao De Jing so gnomic is just the result of it being highly compressed into shorthand by scribes etc
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It is also sometimes very not gnomic because those characters being still in use can have very blunt and mundane meanings. Like, some old texts can seem so immediate you forget that character used to mean another thing. That there has been linguistic change.
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