From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Mon May 19 2003 - 05:08:25 EDT
On Sun, 18 May 2003 00:50:13 +0200, "Philippe Verdy" wrote:
> I know that at some time, China made a request that the correct way to write
> China and Chinese in English should be Zhina and Zhinese (according to the
> official Pynin(?) phonetic transliteration of Han to the Latin script)...
Zhina is the pinyin representation of the characters U+652F ZHI and U+90A3 NA
which in days gone by the Japanese used to call China (as an ideographc
representation of the English word China). This Japanese appellation for China
is considered highly insulting by the Chinese, and I am sure that the Chinese
government would never have advocated its use internationally.
> This failed, but the "zh" symbol was adopted for the ISO629 language code
> (instead of "cn" used in ISO646-1 for the country code)
The "zh" code is for Zhongguo, being the pinyin representation of U+4E2D U+56FD
"Middle Kingdom", the Chinese name for China ("Zhongguo hua" meaning Chinese
language).
> China made other successful requests for Pékin, the traditional French name
(now
> written Beijing both in French and English, despite everybody continues to say
> "Pékin" in French and few people would associate it to Beijing)
Annoyingly, in Britain at least, all the newsreaders insist on pronouncing
Beijing as "Beizhing" (with a soft j as in French), when they would pronounce it
[tolerably] correctly if only they read Beijing as if it were an English word.
Mind you, the way they mangle Chinese is nothing compared to the ridiculous
affected pronounciations they use for words like Chechnya.
Andrew
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