[Multilingual Monday[ Transliteration Woes
So let me be clear: I love non-Latin scripts. One of the joys I have in language study is learning to decode new scripts The "syllable building" of Korean, the root system of Arabic and Hebrew, the focus on meaning with Chinese characters -- they all fascinate me, and a bit of the personality and logic of a language can (usually!) be seen in its writing system.
That doesn't mean I have to love it 100% of the time, of course. Today I was reading some Chinese text (or trying to) and stumbled across 比利時窩夫, and I was stumped. After seeing the last two characters, I thought to myself: "What the hell is a 'nest man'???" I had to look up the character pronunciation and finally realized that it was pronounced wō fū, and realized: this is a bǐ lì shí wō fū, a Belgian waffle. Even though there is a phonetic system that can be used (bopomofo), no one ever seems to use it (outside of Chinese parents living in the States that are being cruel to their children!). Instead, Chinese characters that come closest in sound are picked out to sound out import words. Here, if taking each character by meaning, it's something like "compare benefit time nest man".
Now to be fair, in many transliterations into Chinese use the same characters. 利 seems to come up more often in transliterations than it does in real words. But the fact remains that, for people who aren't native speakers/readers these import words can be huge stumbling blocks. Names of people can also fall into this "trap". I remember reading muckefuck's Chinese posts and he would make mention of friends in Chinese, and I would misinterpret these literally (really, would would set a name apart in the script from anything else??).
Even setting apart import words doesn't mean that its meaning will be immediately clear. While geocaching last night I found a pamphlet on old Route 66 in (surprisingly) Japanese, highlighting one point as デッドマンズカーブ, deddomanzukaabu. Because this is in katakana, one usually assumes it's a foreign word, but then the phonetic imagination comes in. Deddomanzu = "Dead man's," but then comes "kaabu," and it took a bit to realize that it wasn't "carb" or "cab" or "cub" but "curve". Because sounds in English not existing in Japanese, different English words have identical or near-identical transliterations. ドラッグ, draggo, can be both "drag" (and "drag queen") or "drug" (the illegal kind). MANY of these exist and it becomes a matter of context to figure out what the speaker or writer means.
Here I'd love to hear your transliteration woes -- into English, from English, or not even close to involving English! It's all good with me.
That doesn't mean I have to love it 100% of the time, of course. Today I was reading some Chinese text (or trying to) and stumbled across 比利時窩夫, and I was stumped. After seeing the last two characters, I thought to myself: "What the hell is a 'nest man'???" I had to look up the character pronunciation and finally realized that it was pronounced wō fū, and realized: this is a bǐ lì shí wō fū, a Belgian waffle. Even though there is a phonetic system that can be used (bopomofo), no one ever seems to use it (outside of Chinese parents living in the States that are being cruel to their children!). Instead, Chinese characters that come closest in sound are picked out to sound out import words. Here, if taking each character by meaning, it's something like "compare benefit time nest man".
Now to be fair, in many transliterations into Chinese use the same characters. 利 seems to come up more often in transliterations than it does in real words. But the fact remains that, for people who aren't native speakers/readers these import words can be huge stumbling blocks. Names of people can also fall into this "trap". I remember reading muckefuck's Chinese posts and he would make mention of friends in Chinese, and I would misinterpret these literally (really, would would set a name apart in the script from anything else??).
Even setting apart import words doesn't mean that its meaning will be immediately clear. While geocaching last night I found a pamphlet on old Route 66 in (surprisingly) Japanese, highlighting one point as デッドマンズカーブ, deddomanzukaabu. Because this is in katakana, one usually assumes it's a foreign word, but then the phonetic imagination comes in. Deddomanzu = "Dead man's," but then comes "kaabu," and it took a bit to realize that it wasn't "carb" or "cab" or "cub" but "curve". Because sounds in English not existing in Japanese, different English words have identical or near-identical transliterations. ドラッグ, draggo, can be both "drag" (and "drag queen") or "drug" (the illegal kind). MANY of these exist and it becomes a matter of context to figure out what the speaker or writer means.
Here I'd love to hear your transliteration woes -- into English, from English, or not even close to involving English! It's all good with me.