"Foreign" students at Hogwarts (Cho)

[L]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, Petra Pan <ms_petra_pan at y...> 
wrote:
> I am however surprised at the ways both 
> you and DrMM break up the syllable that 
> is 'Chang.'  Could it not also be simply 
> 'chan' and the essentially silent 'g' 
> dropped altogether?  Because really, the 
> syllable-closing consonant sound is not 
> 'g' but 'ng' which is closer to 'n' than 
> a hard 'g.'

No, it couldn't, as that is not how Japanese names would be 
written. "ng" is a particular nasal which, as I previously stated, 
does not exist in Japanese language (only one, the "n" exists). (The 
only time that "ng" would be used as a nasal in transliteration of 
Japanese would be for, perhaps, a product, which would lend the name 
to sound more foreign [though why they would want the product to 
sound more Chinese is beyond me ;D].) IIRC, when Chinese names are 
pronounced in Japanese, if there were a "ng" nasal instead of an "n" 
nasal, it would become "n" regardless in Japanese. So, "Chang" in 
Japanese would be "CHAN" (all the while looking awfully like "Chou", 
a counter which could also mean "lengthen"), a "transliteration" of 
which would be written above the character in katakana, a group of 
phonetic characters generally used with foreign words. 

Thinking of this, I searched for some Japanese sites on how they 
translated the names; Harry Potter, as could be expected, is HARI- 
BOTTA- (double TT == glottal stop, then TA, - == elogation of the 
previous vowel). Cho Chang is CHOU CHAN. 
(Cute fanart found during the search: 
http://matita.eheart.jp/hp/hp_17.html)

> Though the written Chinese has been 
> standardized, the spoken language exists 
> in numerous dialects.  Without knowing 
> which dialect, it's difficult to pin down 
> which phoneme the transliteration is 
> trying to refer to.  Heck, even after 
> identifying the phoneme correctly, there 
> usually are numerous ideograms with that 
> same phoneme/pronunciation. 
> 
> Surely the easiest way to designate a 
> Chinese name in Japanese would be to 
> simply go back to the original source and 
> use kanji.  Which kanji would be the 
> question.  This makes me wonder how the 
> translators of the Chinese versions of HP 
> grappled with this issue before publishing.  
> Was JKR presented with the various choices 
> or did the translators just chose whatever 
> tickled their fancy?  

I rather seriously doubt that she was consulted. From all that I can 
tell, the Chinese (mainland, as I'm not certain if 
Taiwan/Singapore/Hong Kong [e.g. those using traditional characters 
instead of simplified characters, as used in mainland]) version is 
translated from the American edition (it even uses the art); likely 
what had occured was that a publisher was given the rights to a 
translation, and then translated it. The only remotely Chinese-
sounding name is Cho Chang, which, as I previously stated, is taken 
as being the Wade-Giles romanization of "Qiu Zhang" (and it is thus 
written such, as "Qiu-Zhang" -- first name first, last name last, 
thus indicating that it is a foreign-born name), as having "cho", 
which doesn't exist in pinyin, indicates that the romanization used 
is WG. As for the other names (and any other JKR-created words, such 
as "muggle" [magua]), they are written using what I suppose could be 
described as "official" transliterations (e.g. the generic characters 
used to represent foreign sounds). So Harry because "Hali", using 
characters that would be found in the translation of, say, "Italy" 
("Yidali" using the name "li"). It makes reading the news much 
easier, as such characters are generally a give-away that the word is 
foreign. :) 

When (mainland) Chinese names are romanized, at least in the US, the 
names are written using pinyin, regardless of the person's dialectal 
origin; IIRC, the US no longer accepts Wade-Giles transliterations 
from the mainland (although, and again, If I Recall Correctly, people 
from Taiwan and Singapore can use Wade-Giles as this is the 
particular romanization system used there; from HK, they [generally] 
use the set Cantonese romanization [though the term for such slips my 
mind]). Thus, for my friend LI Mingjiang, who is from Sichuan and 
thus speaks Sichuan-ese in addition to the regular putonghua 
(Mandarin), his name was romanized as Li Mingjiang instead of that of 
his particular dialect (Li Men---something or another, I forget; I 
only can speak Mandarin and a conversational level of Shanghai-ese), 
as it is easier. This is how it is done throughout the rest of the 
country as well: When someone from a different area (e.g. Hong Kong) 
is being referred to, one would use their Mandarin pronunciation when 
speaking and romanization when writing (on the flip side, I do not 
believe that Hu Jintao is referred to as "Hu Jintao" in HK, but 
whatever the Cantonese reading of his name is; this is certainly how 
it is done in Shanghai). 


Lina, otherwise known as LI Ailian, but using a different "li" than 
her friend LI Mingjiang