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For Chinese names: include Wade-Giles in addition to Pinyin #4

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yegle opened this issue Jul 26, 2021 · 1 comment
Open

For Chinese names: include Wade-Giles in addition to Pinyin #4

yegle opened this issue Jul 26, 2021 · 1 comment

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@yegle
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yegle commented Jul 26, 2021

The Chinese name you mentioned in the doc is primarily focused on Pinyin which is widely used in Mainland China. There's an alternative romanization system widely used in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and especially among people who immigrants to English-speaking countries in the early 20th centuries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade%E2%80%93Giles

@SteveMCarroll
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Thanks. Yeah, I am definitely familiar with the Wade-Giles system.

So I'm intentionally leaving out immigrants from the early 20th century and earlier because of the problem I discussed in "Rule #1" in the document which is that many of these families have just adopted the 'default' (wrong) English pronunciations and there were so many competing standards in the early days and I don't think the first question should be "figure out what year the person's family immigrated".

The intended audience of the doc is someone who really doesn't know anything about the country in question and so I am just not quite sure how to present that flow chart and I definitely think that all Cantonese names need to be segmented off which complicates Hong Kong. I can definitely imagine something like "Is your co-worker from Taiwan? These rules don't apply and you should check out the Wade-Giles section". Do you think that would be good?

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