On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Richard Cook wrote:
> Jon Babcock wrote:
> >
> > At first glance, I agreed. But then if the U_Chinese3.gif, gets
> > shortened to the last three characters, wanguo ma, as I suspect it
> > would in practice, I'd favor it slightly over the three-character
> > tongyi ma of U_Chinese2.gif. FWIW. To me, wanguo ma emphasizes the
> > multilingual aspect, whereas tongyi ma emphasizes the unifying aspect,
> > but it isn't fully apparent, from the name (tongyi ma) alone, what is
> > being unified.
> Well, I'd say a problem with wanguo ma [lit. 'standard myriad-country
> code'] is that it would be a better translation of Globalcode, rather
> than of Unicode. All in favor of changing the standard name, say aye?
>
> tongyi ma seems much more natural, less clunky to me ... but some people
> prefer what I think is clunky, so I'm willing to admit that my opinion
> of clunkiness may be completely subjective.
How about 'wan4guo2 tong3yi1 ma3' (\u842c\u570b\u7d71\u4e00\u78bc in
Java 'ascii' notation ) or 'tong3yi1 wan4guo2 ma3'? Hmm, the latter
sound a bit 'strange'(although the direct translation into English
sounds a little better than the former: unified international code vs
international unified code), but the former seems fine (to me).
BTW, the transcription in IPA seems not right to me. The last syllable
has to be 'ko\u028ad', doesn't it? OED II has it as 'k\u0259\u028ad'
while Collins Cobuild Dictionary(UK) has 'ko\u028ad'. In addition,
the first vowel in unicode is long, isn't it? So, I think it'd better
be rendered '\u02c8ju\u02d0' instead of '\u02c8ju' (assuming 'u' in
'unicode' is pronounced the same as 'u' in 'unify')
I have little idea how many variations there are in the way American
dictionaries represent pronuniciations, but my copy of Merriam Webster
would have it 'y\u00fcnik\014dd'. (of course, I'm sure some other
dictionaries have it the way as rendered in the web page we're talking
about)
Incidentally, some Koreans who insists on the explicit representation of
long vowels (there used to be two standards on transliteration of foreign
names/words in Korea, one of them requiring the explicit representation
of long vowels) would say that a better Korean transcription of
'\u02c8ju\u02d0n\u026a\u02ccko\u028ad' (IPA) than '\uc720\ub2c8\ucf5b'
is '\uc720\uc6b0\ub2c8\ucf54\uc6b7' or '\uc720\ub2c8\ucf54\uc6b7'.
What's actually used is '\uc720\ub2c8\ucf54\ub4dc'.
Jungshik Shin
P.S. I put the same stuff at <http://ykga.org/~jungshik/i18n/trans.html>
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