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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!bunny!mkw0
From: mkw0@bunny.UUCP (Maurice Wong)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Worst of the Bay
Message-ID: <164@bunny.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 16-Aug-85 09:45:51 EDT
Article-I.D.: bunny.164
Posted: Fri Aug 16 09:45:51 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 21-Aug-85 06:09:23 EDT
References: <450@olivee.UUCP> <132@cadsys.UUCP> <805@ptsfa.UUCP>
Organization: GTE Laboratories, Waltham, MA
Lines: 43

> In article <132@cadsys.UUCP> bbaker@cadsys.UUCP (William Baker) writes:
> >> Well, once again I've stumbled onto another incredibly BAD
> >> eating establishment.  What's amazing is that it has just...
> >> 
> >> Its name -   Tai Pan (Inc.)
> >
> >Ironically, a tai-pan is the chinese word for the master of a whorehouse
> >or a public toilet.  It's amazing the things you pick up from
> >reading too many James Clavell novels...
> 
> Not necessarily. Many different Chinese syllables get transliterated
> the same way in English if only for the fact that distinguishing
> tones are not indicated in the transliteration.
> -- 
> +--------------+-------------------------------+
> | Rob Bernardo | Pacific Bell                  |
> +--------------+ 2600 Camino Ramon, Room 4E700 |
> | 415-823-2417 | San Ramon, California 94583   |
> +--------------+-------------------------------+---------+
> | ihnp4!ptsfa!rob                                        |
> | {nsc,ucbvax,decwrl,amd,fortune,zehntel}!dual!ptsfa!rob |
> +--------------------------------------------------------+

Right!  When tones are missing, it's anybody's guess what the original
Chinese characters are.  To make things worst, we don't know if the
transliteration is from Cantonese or Mandarin, or even some other
dialects.  As if that's not confusing enough, many transliterations are
done without any distinction between 'b' and 'p', 'd' and 't', 'g' and
'k' (actually an unaspirated/aspirated distinction in Chinese, not the
same as the voice/voiceless distinction in English), so that 'tai pan'
might actually be any of the following:

     tai pan, dai pan, dai ban, tai ban

Now add on top of that the tonal distinctions that are not shown--4 in
Mandarin, 6 in Cantonese, the possibilities are numerous, even after
eliminating specific tone and syllable cominations that don't exist, and
eliminating characters that are not usually used as proper names.
-- 
Maurice Wong

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