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Post Info TOPIC: BBC Wimbledon commentators


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RE: BBC Wimbledon commentators


steven wrote:

Heard on the BBC News earlier today: "It's good news for British number one Emma Boulter"


That is priceless!  smile



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Classic McEnroe talking about Jack & Elias previous meeting as in the minor leagues. Id say the Chanllenger level is a bit better than minor league. If it was ITFs I could understand it but not challenger level. His patronising talk of anyone who isnt a seed every year is terrible. Give me Mike Cation or Abigail Johnson or many others over McEnroe any day of the week.

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Stircrazy wrote:
steven wrote:

Heard on the BBC News earlier today: "It's good news for British number one Emma Boulter"


That is priceless!  smile


Sub-titles can be another endless source of amusement.  "Alcaraz" earlier this afternoon came up as "Alcatraz".    smile



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He's certainly difficult to escape from! Autocorrect used to try to do that to me when I typed his name too.

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Another beef on the pronunciation front:  why are the commentators insisting on pronouncing the surname of Harriet Dart's Chinese opponent, Wang Xinyu, as though it were spelt "Wong"?  I know the Yanks do it, as witness the actor, B D Wong, who appeared in L&O:  SVU as the character Dr George Huang.  All of his fellow cast members refer to him as "Wong".  I'm not quibbling about the dropped aitch - I readily admit that I know too little about Mandarin pronunciation to question it - but I don't understand the failure to distinguish between an "a" & an "o".  Otherwise, why bother to make that distinction when the names are transliterated?  confuse



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Stircrazy wrote:

Another beef on the pronunciation front:  why are the commentators insisting on pronouncing the surname of Harriet Dart's Chinese opponent, Wang Xinyu, as though it were spelt "Wong"?  I know the Yanks do it, as witness the actor, B D Wong, who appeared in L&O:  SVU as the character Dr George Huang.  All of his fellow cast members referred to him as "Wong".  I'm not quibbling about the dropped aitch - I readily admit that I know too little about Mandarin pronunciation to question it - but I don't understand the failure to distinguish between an "a" & an "o".  Otherwise, why bother to make that distinction when the names are transliterated? confuse


 Isn't the whole point of transliteration to spell it how it's pronounced? Otherwise why bother giving a Roman alphabet equivalent? 



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Brendan F wrote:
Stircrazy wrote:

Another beef on the pronunciation front:  why are the commentators insisting on pronouncing the surname of Harriet Dart's Chinese opponent, Wang Xinyu, as though it were spelt "Wong"?  I know the Yanks do it, as witness the actor, B D Wong, who appeared in L&O:  SVU as the character Dr George Huang.  All of his fellow cast members referred to him as "Wong".  I'm not quibbling about the dropped aitch - I readily admit that I know too little about Mandarin pronunciation to question it - but I don't understand the failure to distinguish between an "a" & an "o".  Otherwise, why bother to make that distinction when the names are transliterated? confuse


 Isn't the whole point of transliteration to spell it how it's pronounced? Otherwise why bother giving a Roman alphabet equivalent? 


That's precisely my point!  Why bother having the surname transliterated as WAng when it's meant to be pronounced WOng?  I note that the umpire is saying WAng, not that umpires are an infallible guide...



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On her WTA profile you can hear her say her name. Sounds more like Wan than Wong to me. But this has been a point of discussion before, I'm sure I remember.

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Nick Kyrios isn't very impressed with Andrew Castle. Article in The Times this evening

https://archive.ph/Wc4ET



-- Edited by the addict on Tuesday 9th of July 2024 09:05:58 PM

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Enjoyed listening to Ash Barty give her views on the Wimbledon highlights this year, and on Five Live. Sensible and interesting

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Stircrazy wrote:
Brendan F wrote:
Stircrazy wrote:

Another beef on the pronunciation front:  why are the commentators insisting on pronouncing the surname of Harriet Dart's Chinese opponent, Wang Xinyu, as though it were spelt "Wong"?  I know the Yanks do it, as witness the actor, B D Wong, who appeared in L&O:  SVU as the character Dr George Huang.  All of his fellow cast members referred to him as "Wong".  I'm not quibbling about the dropped aitch - I readily admit that I know too little about Mandarin pronunciation to question it - but I don't understand the failure to distinguish between an "a" & an "o".  Otherwise, why bother to make that distinction when the names are transliterated? confuse


 Isn't the whole point of transliteration to spell it how it's pronounced? Otherwise why bother giving a Roman alphabet equivalent? 


That's precisely my point!  Why bother having the surname transliterated as WAng when it's meant to be pronounced WOng?  I note that the umpire is saying WAng, not that umpires are an infallible guide...


This explanation will be far more than most of you might ever want to know but it's complicated, and I'm hoping that one (i.e. just SC!) or two of you might find it interesting. 

When you start learning Chinese, you quickly realise that while pinyin* is good at lulling you into a (false) sense of security, you can't just say words the way you'd say them if they were spelt that way in English. That shouldn't come as a huge surprise - even nearby European countries don't pronounce all letters the same way as us!

Some consonants do sound much the same but if you try to say pinyin r, x, c, q, etc as you would in English, you're quickly going to come a cropper. Other consonants are much closer to each other than in English, e.g. b/p, r/l, which explains why the French still call Beijing Pékin and the Chinese get their own back by calling Paris Bali (not to be confused with the Indonesian island, which is pronounced exactly the same in Chinese but, mercifully for those catching flights from China to either place, is written with different characters)   

With vowels, it's quite subtle. Often the standard Chinese pronunciation is somewhere in between English vowels. Wang is a particularly complicated one. Here, the pinyin final is 'ang' but it doesn't sound like -ang (as it looks like it should) or -ong (as some Chinese people will tell you it should - that gives a clue as to why some Chinese people pronounce 'ong' a bit oddly in English words).

If anything, it's closer to the 'ung' sound in 'tongue' or 'young', at least in northern standard Mandarin, which is what I've studied. The way this Chinese person says Wang https://youtu.be/ZxZVrgQc6JI?t=24 matches how I hear and say it, though because the vowel modulates a bit (and because we have slightly different ways of saying some vowels in English depending on the region we come from!), some might still hear it as Wang, Wong, or even Waung or Wuang. biggrin disbelief

Additional complication is provided by the fact that the same Chinese character can be pronounced in different ways in northern and southern Mandarin, in Cantonese (used in, for example, HK and Guangdong - a completely different language from Mandarin even though most of the words look the same in Chinese characters), in Wu (=Shanghainese), etc, etc. For all I know, the players called Wang who say it should be pronounced Wong come from the south and maybe it really is much closer to Wong down there, or at least closer to Wong than Wang. 

 

* pinyin is the PRC's romanisation system - Taiwan has a different transliteration system (sometimes known as bopomofo) that doesn't use roman letters - that makes it harder to recognise the letters that do sound the same as in English but easier to avoid all the pitfalls when the sounds aren't the same.

Taiwan does have a romanisation system too, but it's not the same as pinyin. For example, top doubles player Hsieh Su-wei would have her name romanised as Xie Shuwei if she came from the PRC.

To be fair to the Chinese, pinyin is much better than the earlier standard, a European attempt at romanisation known as Wade-Giles - that was the reason why Beijing used to be known as Peking, Guangdong as Canton, Tianjin as Tientsin and so on - contrary to popular belief in the West, the Chinese themselves never changed the names of these places in Chinese characters or the way they pronounced them, it was just the way they were transliterated that changed, and the Chinese pinyin system, for all its flaws and pitfalls, gets much closer to the real sounds than Wade-Giles ever did.



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steven wrote: 

If anything, it's closer to the 'ung' sound in 'tongue' or 'young', at least in northern standard Mandarin, which is what I've studied. The way this Chinese person says Wang https://youtu.be/ZxZVrgQc6JI?t=24 matches how I hear and say it, though because the vowel modulates a bit (and because we have slightly different ways of saying some vowels in English depending on the region we come from!), some might still hear it as Wang, Wong, or even Waung or Wuang. biggrindisbelief


 

Thank you for this, Steven - I found it very interesting!!

When I got to this part, I was also thinking about how English often doesn't naturally include certain sounds (can I produce a Dutch "ui" or German "ü"? No, I cannot, except badly with a lot of effort, because my mouth didn't learn to make those shapes as a baby!) and how regional accents also influence that, such as the caught-cot merger. Which is why IPA exists, and even then, someone can know what the IPA stands for and still struggle to reproduce it themselves. 



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steven wrote:
Stircrazy wrote:
Brendan F wrote:
Stircrazy wrote:

Another beef on the pronunciation front:  why are the commentators insisting on pronouncing the surname of Harriet Dart's Chinese opponent, Wang Xinyu, as though it were spelt "Wong"?  I know the Yanks do it, as witness the actor, B D Wong, who appeared in L&O:  SVU as the character Dr George Huang.  All of his fellow cast members referred to him as "Wong".  I'm not quibbling about the dropped aitch - I readily admit that I know too little about Mandarin pronunciation to question it - but I don't understand the failure to distinguish between an "a" & an "o".  Otherwise, why bother to make that distinction when the names are transliterated? confuse


 Isn't the whole point of transliteration to spell it how it's pronounced? Otherwise why bother giving a Roman alphabet equivalent? 


That's precisely my point!  Why bother having the surname transliterated as WAng when it's meant to be pronounced WOng?  I note that the umpire is saying WAng, not that umpires are an infallible guide...


This explanation will be far more than most of you might ever want to know but it's complicated, and I'm hoping that one (i.e. just SC!) or two of you might find it interesting. 

When you start learning Chinese, you quickly realise that while pinyin* is good at lulling you into a (false) sense of security, you can't just say words the way you'd say them if they were spelt that way in English. That shouldn't come as a huge surprise - even nearby European countries don't pronounce all letters the same way as us!

Some consonants do sound much the same but if you try to say pinyin r, x, c, q, etc as you would in English, you're quickly going to come a cropper. Other consonants are much closer to each other than in English, e.g. b/p, r/l, which explains why the French still call Beijing Pékin and the Chinese get their own back by calling Paris Bali (not to be confused with the Indonesian island, which is pronounced exactly the same in Chinese but, mercifully for those catching flights from China to either place, is written with different characters)   

With vowels, it's quite subtle. Often the standard Chinese pronunciation is somewhere in between English vowels. Wang is a particularly complicated one. Here, the pinyin final is 'ang' but it doesn't sound like -ang (as it looks like it should) or -ong (as some Chinese people will tell you it should - that gives a clue as to why some Chinese people pronounce 'ong' a bit oddly in English words).

If anything, it's closer to the 'ung' sound in 'tongue' or 'young', at least in northern standard Mandarin, which is what I've studied. The way this Chinese person says Wang https://youtu.be/ZxZVrgQc6JI?t=24 matches how I hear and say it, though because the vowel modulates a bit (and because we have slightly different ways of saying some vowels in English depending on the region we come from!), some might still hear it as Wang, Wong, or even Waung or Wuang. biggrin disbelief

Additional complication is provided by the fact that the same Chinese character can be pronounced in different ways in northern and southern Mandarin, in Cantonese (used in, for example, HK and Guangdong - a completely different language from Mandarin even though most of the words look the same in Chinese characters), in Wu (=Shanghainese), etc, etc. For all I know, the players called Wang who say it should be pronounced Wong come from the south and maybe it really is much closer to Wong down there, or at least closer to Wong than Wang. 

 

* pinyin is the PRC's romanisation system - Taiwan has a different transliteration system (sometimes known as bopomofo) that doesn't use roman letters - that makes it harder to recognise the letters that do sound the same as in English but easier to avoid all the pitfalls when the sounds aren't the same.

Taiwan does have a romanisation system too, but it's not the same as pinyin. For example, top doubles player Hsieh Su-wei would have her name romanised as Xie Shuwei if she came from the PRC.

To be fair to the Chinese, pinyin is much better than the earlier standard, a European attempt at romanisation known as Wade-Giles - that was the reason why Beijing used to be known as Peking, Guangdong as Canton, Tianjin as Tientsin and so on - contrary to popular belief in the West, the Chinese themselves never changed the names of these places in Chinese characters or the way they pronounced them, it was just the way they were transliterated that changed, and the Chinese pinyin system, for all its flaws and pitfalls, gets much closer to the real sounds than Wade-Giles ever did.


Thanks for that, Steven, very instructive.  I was hoping you might wade in at some stage.  wink I love the Paris-Bali example - up there with the Polish version of "Rome", viz. Rzym...

I know next to nothing about the pronunciation of Chinese names (& the few words in English which are of Chinese origin - on which subject this Wiki page makes fascinating reading.  I knew about "chin chin", "chop chop", "typhoon", "kowtow", "tea", "ketchup" & obviously the other food terms, but I was intrigued to learn of the origins of "brainwash" & "paper tiger").  That said, I was aware of the pinyin system &, after years of looking at Chinese tennis players' names, have come to realise that if they begin with "Hs", it's odds on that they're Taiwanese.  Your explanation that the Taiwanese use a different system of transliteration suddenly makes sense.

I always remember how, on my only visit to China (a day trip up the Pearl River from Hong Kong), we were on our way back from Guangzhou/Canton by train (having reached it on the outward journey by hydrofoil for the first part & then by bus).  Given the length of the journey, a Cantonese film was shown - with Chinese sub-titles!  We were told that that was because spoken Cantonese was very different from spoken Mandarin, although the characters were the same.  I suppose that there are parallels on the place name front with India, where cities have also in relatively recent years been renamed in English, but not in the relevant local language (of which there are, of course, many more in India than there are in China), e.g. Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai) & (arguably the greatest change for native English-speakers) Madras (Chennai).

Off topic, my latest Clare Balding beef:  she's been pronouncing the first syllable of Lorenzo Musetti's surname like the first syllable of "music"!  furious



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Stircrazy wrote:
Off topic, my latest Clare Balding beef:  she's been pronouncing the first syllable of Lorenzo Musetti's surname like the first syllable of "music"!  furious
Clare B gone with the MOOOOOsetti joke biggrin


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Well spotted re. Hs- implying Taiwanese not Chinese. Ts- is the same.

Yes, while having to learn characters is a real pain (albeit one you can gradually learn to love, though it still irks me when I can work out how a word sounds but not what it means or work out how it means but not how it sounds, and it does happen both ways round), the big advantage is that whatever Chinese language or dialect you speak, you can all read the same thing (especially subtitles) without any problem even if hearing the same words spoken might be totally unintelligible. Simplified vs traditional characters makes this a bit more complicated, but still.

Some of the characters map over to Japanese (as kanji) as well. For example, the capital of Japan is made up of the same two characters in both languages, despite being pronounced Dongjing in Chinese (dong = east, jing = capital, c.f. Beijing = northern capital and an old capital of China, Nanjing = southern capital) and Tokyo in Japanese. If Europe had adopted a similar system centuries ago (and also never adopted all the variation in grammar rules, such as verb placement in German), there might now be no need for translators of texts from one European language to another, though there would definitely still be a need for interpreters.

Re. Bali/Paris, I think the place travellers are most likely to be confused by this kind of thing is in Italy. The Italian for Munich is Monaco, and the Italian for Monaco is also Monaco. Given that trains from northern Italy go to/via both places, and when I was there, they didn't make it obvious which one they meant. So, if you're not that familiar with Europe and can't work it out from the final destination or from the other stations en route, it must be all too easy to get on a train to Bavaria when you actually want to go to the Côte d'Azur!



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