A linguistic hybrid: naming Roman letters in Chinese

[imron]

Merging. See previous posts for numerous different lists of English alphabet pronunciations in Chinese.

[Don_Horhe]

Actual pronunciation varies, with education, as Iriya pointed out, being the decisive factor. I myself have never come across the pronunciations I cited above, and have almost exclusively heard them pronounced as one would in English, with varying degrees of accuracy.

[davoosh]

I just found this useful table from wikipedia (http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%8B%89%E4%B8%81%E5%AD%97%E6%AF%8D%E6%BC%A2%E8%AA%9E%E8%AE%80%E9%9F%B3):

字母 漢語拼音標音 同音字 A ēi B bì 閉 C sēi 塞（白讀） D dì 地 E yì 意 F ái fu 癌副 G jì 既 H éi chi I ài 或 ái 愛 或 癌 J zhèi 這（口語） K kèi L ái lur 癌露兒 M ái mu 癌木 N ēn 恩 O ōu 歐 P pì 僻 Q kiùr R àr 或 ár 二 S ái si 癌四 T tì 替 U yōu 幽 V wēi（聲母多為唇齒音 /ʋ/） 微 W dá bu liu 達不六 X ái ke si 癌克四 Y wài（聲母多為雙唇音 /w/） 外 Z zèi

[jbradfor]

Seems strange to me that they would use "PM" rather than "下午".

[davoosh]

I don't think it meant 下午, in this case they were talking about pollution, in which context PM apparently stands for 'Particulate Matter'.

[jbradfor]

Ah, thanks. I guess that is easier to say than 懸浮粒子.

[Iriya]

Somewhat on-topic.

While the Japanese always tend to use the katakana pronunciation (e.g. "tape recorder" becomes teepurekoodaa), unless their English level is pretty high (which is very rare for a Japanese person), the Chinese don't have any native system of pronouncing/approximating the English/foreign words to fall back onto, so they just learn to pronounce them the right way, more or less.

It's really funny if you think about it. There are tons of English loanwords in the Japanese language (and there's more and more of them every year, some would say that they're gradually replacing a lot of the native vocabulary, e.g. the Japanese now tend to say furuutsu instead of kudamono, dorinku instead of nomimono, etc), yet the Japanese can barely speak any English. At the same time, there's very few English loanwords in Chinese (the Chinese prefer to directly translate foreign concepts, e.g. "hot line" = 热线), yet the Chinese speak much better English than the Japanese.

[atitarev]

It's really funny if you think about it. There are tons of English loanwords in the Japanese language (and there's more and more of them every year, some would say that they're gradually replacing a lot of the native vocabulary, e.g. the Japanese now tend to say furuutsu instead of kudamono, dorinku instead of nomimono, etc), yet the Japanese can barely speak any English. At the same time, there's very few English loanwords in Chinese (the Chinese prefer to directly translate foreign concepts, e.g. "hot line" = 热线), yet the Chinese speak much better English than the Japanese.

I thought about this too. It must have something to do with the Japanese phonology. On another thought, the Chinese writing system doesn't allow mass immigration of loanwords, so if many foreign words are used in Chinese communities overseas, the words don't get adopted and brushed off as Chinglish. These combinations: "打tennis" (打网球), "吃pizza" (吃比萨) by overseas Chinese, even Taiwan but the question is, will they survive?

[drungood]

I've noticed a lot of times when Chinese spell, at least on TV/radio, they give three letters then tell which one they're choosing.

i.e. to spell "cat" they would say,

ABC的C, ABC的A, TUV的T

or something like that. So I think they have difficulties understand roman letters even if it's a native speaker.

[bluetortilla]

How are the ABC's pronounced in Mandarin? Not Pinyin mind you, but each letter of the English alphabet. Is there a chart for this on the web somewhere?

 

Thanks!

[imron]

Is there a chart for this on the web somewhere?

Right on this very site in fact

 

Merging with answer.

[Demonic_Duck]

I'm not sure there's consensus even among Chinese people, although it always seems to be based on the English pronunciation. I remember recently a colleague pronounced "C" as "西" and wasn't initially understood by another colleague. The weird thing is, the first colleague speaks decent(ish) English and the second can barely speak a word.

 

Also...

 

I've noticed a lot of times when Chinese spell, at least on TV/radio, they give three letters then tell which one they're choosing.

i.e. to spell "cat" they would say,

ABC的C, ABC的A, TUV的T

or something like that. So I think they have difficulties understand roman letters even if it's a native speaker.

 

Yet another Chinese colleague recently did this with me on the phone. I wasn't sure whether she'd said B口 or C口, so I asked for confirmation and she said "ABC的B". Very helpful. It's a pity so few Chinese are familiar with the NATO phonetic alphabet...

[metal.lunchbox]

My experience also leads me to believe that while there are no doubt plenty of tables or even recording suggesting some kind of standard, the real standard is actually English, but most people in China have very little experience with English from native speakers so pronunciation varies depending on the situation. If it wasn't based on English it would by now no longer be mutually intelligible to English speakers because of the extreme differences in Chinese and English phonology. "W" and "V" in particular would have drifted to something more naturally for native Chinese speakers. I'm skeptical of claims that this varies according to region. It seems more likely that one's English teacher would have vastly more influence over this. Its worth reminding everyone as well that while most people don't speak good English and have heard very little English from a native speaker, English is not some far off concept. Written English is ubiquitous and pretty much anyone under 50 will have had several years of English lessons. The teacher makes their best effort to imitate a proper English pronunciation (although their reference may also be a non-native speaker) and the students do their best to imitate their teacher. After they've handed all their English lessons back to the teacher (as I've heard many people explain their lack of English skills) what remains is a slightly different pronunciation than the native English speaker depending largely on the memory and pronunciation skills of each person involved in the chain.