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| Sunday, 9 May 2004 |
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It's as Easy as ABC By Nury Vittachi Cursed by illogical systems of romanization, Asian languages are divided by a common alphabet I was in Vietnam recently, when a young Ho Chi Minh City woman approached me in a bar. "My name is Yum," she said. "Spelt D-A-N-G." Oo-la-la! Was she indulging in some sort of suggestive wordplay? Yum, as in "delicious," would certainly have described her. But then I remembered something. In southern (but not northern) Vietnam, "d" is pronounced "y". So Dang probably did pronounce her name "Yum," and was not trying to hint at how delectable she was. (If you are heading to Hanoi, ignore the above. There, Dang would be pronounced "Zum.") Conversely, my name baffled her. In southern (but not northern) Vietnam, "v" is also pronounced "y". It was bizarre to her that Vittachi started with a "v". After years of sampling Asian languages, one thing is clear to me. People who set up romanization systems for these tongues should be boiled alive in tom yum (not "tong yam"). They have made cross-border communications nightmarish, causing millions of lost man-hours and productivity. The romanization in my Hong Kong home town is particularly screwy. The Kowloon suburb pronounced "Wonggok" is spelt "Mong Kok". In most places, romanizers merely get the sounds mixed up, but in this case, they accidentally turned the initial letter upside down. Last week I was in Korea (a society led by a man named Roh, pronounced "No"), and got the last room in a fully booked hotel. "Is Korean style room," the hotel staffer told me. "Not bad." "I'm sure it will be fine," I replied. Only when I got to the room did I discover that "Not bad" was his articulation of the English words "No bed." My wife, who is English, went into a grocery shop in south India and asked for a pound of butter. "What is butter?" asked the Trivandrum shop assistant in faultless English. "Butter, Yellow stuff that goes on bread," my wife replied. He shook his head. He had never heard of it. He called the manager, who also professed ignorance of the concept. After she referred to toast and marmalade, light dawned. "Ah, You were saying 'butter', but what you really wanted was 'butter'!" the manager replied, before giving her an English lesson. "Butter.' Pronounced 'but-ter'. Now you try it." This exchange baffled her until I pointed out that the Indian languages have a generous variety of "b" sounds, and she had clearly used the wrong one. An American friend was taught the Cantonese word for book, which sounds to my ears as a semi-whistled "szhu" sound, but is romanized as "su." He put up his hand in class. "Is it 'Sue' or 'shoe' or 'zoo?" The teacher's forehead wrinkled. "It's not 'Sue' or 'shoe' or 'zoo', she whistled. "It is 'szhu'." Indeed, the Cantonese word for book hovers somewhere in the middle of "Sue" and "shoe" and "zoo". It took me years to get it right, after which I started Mandarin classes, where I spent years un-learning it. (The Mandarin for book is pronounced "shoe".) My greatest ire is reserved for the evil monsters who created pinyin, the romanization system cursed daily by untold millions of scholars of Chinese all over the world. The entire system is based on booby-traps. The letter "q" is pronounced "ch", while "c" is "ts" and "z" is "ds." Worst of all, pinyin includes one of the most difficult Asian language sounds to pick up. The letter "r" represents a sound which is "j" and "z" spoken simultaneously. Why why why? Because the originators of pinyin hated us and wanted to ruin our lives. Some scholars think it was Marco Polo's inability to master this "jz" sound that turned "Nippon" (or "Nihon") into "Japan". Chinese speakers pronounced that country's name in a way which sounded to his Italian ears as "jzrrrpn." Being unable to do a "j" and a "z" together, he romanized it to "Chipangu", the possible root of the English word Japan. Anyway, those are the thoughts that went through my mind in rapid succession in that Ho Chi Minh City bar as the scrumptious Dang/Yum lost interest in me and wandered off. "Yum," I thought. And then: "Dang." Courtesy: Far Eastern Economic Review. |
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