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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Replying to @jeannette_ng @arthur_affect and
It blew my mind when I found out "Harry" exists because of how the English pronounced the French name "Henri"
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Replying to @UnknownEnby @jeannette_ng and
My own last name is a bizarre Anglicization of a common French name! My favorite is that "Lloyd" and "Floyd" are secretly the same name: in Welsh, "ll" represents a lateral fricative, which English-speakers interpret as an F sound!
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Yeah and the name "Rose" (which I assume isn't your actual surname) means the flower, from Latin through French ("rosa"), but people from Britain with "Rose" as a surname have an etymologically unrelated name, a derived spelling of "Ross"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @UnknownEnby and
Amelia Bloody Rose Retweeted Amelia Bloody Rose
Rose is my middle name. Last name is Margetts, which is a weird variant on Margaret. Which has its own entertaining stuff going on:https://twitter.com/AmeliaRoseWrite/status/1245671731836010496?s=20 …
Amelia Bloody Rose added,
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Replying to @AmeliaRoseWrite @arthur_affect and
But now that you mention it, both "Amelia" and "Rose" are sort of mashed together from Germanic and Romance languages, too! Amelia is Germanic seems to have converged with Romance Emilia. Rose bounced all over the place, looks like
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