a. I suppose Mr. Leung and Mr. Tung used Wade-Giles Romanization (or system)
for their name's spelling, which looks very popular outside China mainland
including Hong Kong, and inside China mainland before the year of 1958 when
Pinyin (Chinese phonetic alphabet) was published.
b. I believe Taiwanese has adopted Pinyin system for Chinese Character now,
but they used Wade-Giles system before.
c. Pinyin has been employed on the passport of China Mainland, but I don't
think they are friendly enough for people speaking English to pronounce. To
me, some Pinyin of Chinese character are just for spelling in English, and
are not feasible for the correct pronunciation.
d. Pinyin uses roman (or roughly English) characters to denote the sounds of
Chinese Character, but in the Chinese style, which always causes confusion
in pronunciation. Though the beginning lessons on Chinese language in the
preliminary school is on the Pinyin (or Phonetic alphabet of Chinese
Character), but the foreigner seldom gets chance to learn it. :-(
Best Regards,
Leaf
-----Original Message-----
From: ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
[mailto:ietf-bounces(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org] On Behalf Of Cao,
Zhen
Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2013 4:35 PM
To: Ted Hardie
Cc: IETF Discussion
Subject: Re: Regarding call Chinese names
On Tue, Jul 16, 2013 at 12:04 AM, Ted Hardie
<ted(_dot_)ietf(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 5:26 PM, Hui Deng <denghui02(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com>
wrote:
Hi Ted,
I did explain them in the 1st paragraph about minorities (not
mentioned that they could have two kids in mainland) anyway, I will
revise the title by adding "Chinese "Han" people", hope that will be
ok
-Hui
While it is always valuable to note national minorities, I believe you
missed the point. In some territories, there are dialects of Chinese
other than Mandarin and romanizations other than pinyin which are
common and normatively correct. For those Chinese people, your
document does not apply. As an example, the current chief executive
of Hong Kong is properly called Leung Chun Ying (梁振英); his
predecessor in that role was Tung Chee Hwa (董建?A). Similar situations
arise in Taiwan and in many territories where Chinese people are
themselves national minorities.
That's not Pinyin system. I have a question for you, do you think these
spellings are self pronounciable?
Clarifying that your document is specific to the pinyin romanization
is likely enough (since that romanization is based on Mandarin).
We actually clarify that in pinyin draft,
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-zcao-chinese-pronounce-01
Thanks,
caozhen