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Chinese Dialect Question

From:JS Bangs <jaspax@...>
Date:Tuesday, September 30, 2003, 21:20
In the department I work at, we just got a new grad student from China
named "Quan Zhou". We naturally pronounced the first part of that as
/kwan/, more or less, until he arrived and said something more like
/tSwEn/. This is such a bizarre difference that I had to make a theory
about why. Either (1) "Quan" is just a truly awful Romanization, or (2)
"Quan" is a pretty decent Romanization for Mandarin, but /tSwEn/ is
speaking and pronouncing his name in a different dialect. Can the
Sinologists on the list confirm or deny either hypothesis?

The character that appears on his passport looks like this:

          ^
         / \
        /---\
          |
         ---
          |
        -----

Only flatter and wider.

--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"

Reply

JR <fuscian@...>