Tea/Chinese pedantry

[marlo]

Despite what you may have heard to the contrary, Pu'Er (aka Pu-Erh, although the H is superfluous [in Pinyin it is just Er so I don't know who added it] and adds no information regarding pronunciation) is not pronounced Poo-Air, but rather Poo-Ar (like the letter R) in Chinese

Comments

[firni]

Speaking of pedantry, my oncologist's name is Wang, but it's pronounced WONG. I should get her to write out the character for me so I can show my friend's wife. He said the same symbol for his last name is spelled Chinn, Chin, Chan, Ching, Chun, Chung, etc.

Stupid INS.

AIYA

[marlo]

YEAH. The thing is that people from the Mainland write their names in Pinyin, but pinyin isn't always apparent to native speakers. Wang is a good example. It's always pronounced Wong. (In Chinese it means "king" :)) There is also Huang, pronounced like Hwong, meaning "yellow." But yes, Wong is right!

And yeah to further complicate the "Chin" thing, there are multiple last names with multiple spellings. In Pinyin they are Chen (pronounced Chun), Cheng (pronounced Chung), Qin (pronounced sort of like Cheen), Qian (Chee-yen), That's not counting when people translate their name from Cantonese, like Cheung (which is their version of Zhang, pronounced Jong in Mandarin). I don't know Cantonese so I don't know how that all works. I pulled all those off the 100 most common surnames -- there are others as well.

Also there are a lot of sounds in Chinese that are universally translated as "Ch", even though they're all different.

AIYA

[marlo]

I should have said "pinyin isn't always apparent to native ENGLISH speakers."

Re: AIYA

[firni]

What's really funny is when my friend got married, I heard his future mother-in-law saying that his parents were speaking a "peasant" dialect of Cantonese. AIYA