CHINESE CHARACTERS

My post about a month ago on another pun for the Year of the Rabbit was in part an excuse for me to note how common “OMG” (oh my God) has become in Taiwan. Indeed, it should be considered not just English anymore but a frequently used loan word, one that is usually written, using the Roman alphabet, as a “lettered word” in Mandarin (i.e., “OMG“). But sometimes “oh my God” shows up in Chinese characters (e.g., 喔麥尬) used as phonetic approximations of the English. And sometimes, as in today’s pun-tastic example, it appears in a mix of English and Chinese characters.To get more news about <b>https://www.shine.cn/news/in-focus/2202172014/ chinese letters alphabet</a></b>, you can visit shine news official website.

The character “治” is also worthy of note as an example of why Chinese characters are so damn hard. The character has two main parts. The left side has 氵, which is an alternate form of “水,” which is used in writing “shuǐ” (“water”) and many other words. The right side is 台 (tái), which is used in writing the word for platform but which is most commonly seen in Taiwan used phonetically in place names: Taiwan, Taipei (Taibei), Taichung (Taizhong), Taitung (Taidong), etc. So in terms of sound, that’s a shui and a tai. But in this case the phonetic hint commonly given in Chinese characters is 台 (tái). So does that mean the character “治” is pronounced tái?

Of course, a character used for pier would make no sense on a sign for nougat. But as we’ll see, there are other things that don’t make sense here.

As I noted above, “xiān zhì niúgátáng” means “freshly made nougat.” But the weird thing is the character being used for zhì isn’t the “right” one. The sign uses “治” rather than the proper and homophonous “製” (zhì). The character used in the sign, however, doesn’t mean “made” but is instead most often seen in terms like zhìlǐ (治理), which is the Mandarin word for manage/administer/govern. Freshly administered nougat just doesn’t have much of a ring to it. So why did the company use that? My guess — and it’s just a guess — is that they wanted to evoke “Taiwan” through the 台 (tai) part of the character. (The company’s website — which has plenty of instances of the character 製 — claims that their nougat is one of the most popular purchases by tourists from China.) My long-suffering Taiwanese wife, however, exclaims that I think too much, and she yearns for the day when I find a more traditional hobby than spotting strange signs and asking her to help me understand them.
Victor Mair’s recent post at Language Log on Transcription vs. transliteration vs. translation in cartography brought to mind last year’s Turkey/Türkiye situation, which I meant to write about at the time but never did. Briefly, the Turkish government basically said, “We’d like the world to stop calling the country ‘Turkey’ and use ‘Türkiye’ instead.” (As far as I know, the government didn’t call for a revision of “Turkish.”)

A lot of countries agreed to go along with the switch. Last month the United States officially jumped on board as well — sort of. The U.S. State Department’s web page on this currently states, “The official conventional long-form and short-form names remain “Republic of Turkey” and “Turkey”, respectively. “Republic of Türkiye” should be used in formal and diplomatic contexts. The conventional names may be used in place of or alongside “Türkiye” in appropriate instances, including U.S. government cartographic products, as it is more widely understood by the American public.”
But, this being a site that focuses mainly on matters related to Mandarin, I’m more interested in what China and Taiwan did.

It turns out that both China and Taiwan agreed to adopt the form “Türkiye.” In practice, though, that relates mainly to those governments issuing releases in English. But what about the Mandarin name of the country, which has been “Tǚ’ěrqí” (written “土耳其” in Chinese characters).
“Tǚ’ěrqí” belongs to the third category; it is just a phonetic approximation of “Turkey.” (For those unfamiliar with Pinyin or Mandarin, Tu’erqi is pronounced very roughly like “to” + “her” (minus the h sound) + the “chee” in cheese.) Among Mandarin’s 410 or so syllable sounds (not counting tones), there is nothing much like key. But the ye in Türkiye would not be a problem for Mandarin speakers.

If the governments of China and Taiwan really wanted to show their respect for the change from Turkey to Türkiye, they could come up with new Mandarin names that would do a better job of matching the pronunciation of Türkiye than Tu’erqi. But they haven’t. Tu’erqi/土耳其 remains, and this is unlikely to change. Note, for example, how the Xinhua article listed below calls “Türkiye” not the name but the foreign-language name (waiwen) of Tu’erqi.