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Tsing Tao should change to Qing Dao


suMMit

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Consider the beer a useful reminder that there's linguistic value to be found in encountering alternative romanisation schemes :). It was only after I learned Wades-Giles (useful for old books - and way more sophisticated!) that realised I needed to make some tweaks to my 普通话 pronunciation. Also, the number of people who can read pinyin but can't read Chinese characters is probably too niche for the beer company to consider changing its branding....

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17 hours ago, Demonic_Duck said:

you'll have a hell of a time convincing English speakers that "Qingdao" is actually the exact same word as "Tsingtao".

Also, for the English-speaking market at least, I suspect you'll get a lot closer to the actual pronunciation with 'ts' than 'q'.

 

Edit: Also, Qing Dao? Bold to insist on pinyin and then completely ignore capitalisation and spacing conventions...

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I feel like this is deliberate for branding and marketing purposes that they don’t change the spelling. There are a few big brands from where I grew up that were established a long time ago and when we had spelling change in the 70s they kept the old spelling I guess to show that they’re old and established and also for nostalgia reason. 
 

Though honestly I also find the old spelling irks me, because I learn pinyin and my brain just hates inconsistency. 

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52 minutes ago, roddy said:

You guys need to relax. Sit back, pour yourself a small glass of Kweichow Moutai and light a Chunghwa cigarette. 

 

... and pray you don't come across any Chinese companies using traditional characters in their PRC branding.....!

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3 hours ago, imron said:

And if that doesn’t work, you can also then try blue or black. 

I was thinking it would offer a chance for endless debate among drinkers but I looked at the Baidu page and apparently the original island was noted for its luxuriant foliage green all year round so it's not so ambiguous as usual. Was also hoping there might be some peculiar local way of pronouncing the name but it seems the Qingdao dialect is fairly standard in the matter of their own name, they veer off piste in other vocabulary items.

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Having sat on a call recently where coworkers were discussing the new cybersecurity laws banning technology from Huawei, Hanzhou, Dahua, etc., I have to say that I think you may have forgotten how you yourself would have thought pinyin sounded before your Chinese classes began. Those pre-pinyin renderings may not be perfect, but I think they were closer to the mark than a lot of people realize, and all it takes it hearing someone saying "Hanne Zoo" and "Da Hoo-ey" a few times to remind oneself just how intuitive they really were, or perhaps rather, how unintuitive pinyin is. 

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1 hour ago, PerpetualChange said:

how unintuitive pinyin is

 

From an anglocentric view, sure, but it's not designed to represent the sounds of English. Calling it unintuitive is like complaining that "qu'est-ce que c'est" isn't spelled "kes ke say".

 

If anything, the un-English-like spelling should be a good hint that the pronunciation also won't be English-like. The problem is that people often don't learn even an approximation of the correct pronunciation, and also that there's some misinformation flying around. A common example is "x" being pronounced /ʒ/, which isn't even a pronunciation an English speaker would naturally guess.

 

For their part, Huawei used to (maybe still do?) prescribe that their name should be pronounced /ˈwɑːweɪ/ in English.

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Since we are at it...

 

I don't mind Pinyin at all and actually is not a bad phonetic representation of the language, except for the "c" sound which I strongly think should be represented by "ts" instead.

 

Romaji beats Pinyin though. 

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1 hour ago, xinoxanu said:

I don't mind Pinyin at all and actually is not a bad phonetic representation of the language, except for the "c" sound which I strongly think should be represented by "ts" instead.

 

Waste of letters, plus the sound isn't even used at the start of syllables in English, so it'd be a weird choice to base it on English.

 

Also like every Slavic language with a Latin-based alphabet already uses "c" for /t͡s/.

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16 minutes ago, Demonic_Duck said:

Waste of letters, plus it's not even used at the start of syllables in English, so it'd be a weird choice to base it on English.

 

Bold of you to assume that my statement is based on English phonetics ?

 

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Oh, I am sure 周有光 and those who reviewed the system afterwards had their reasons to choose this or that letter -I won't pretend to know better than them.

 

Although... @Lu and other professionals in the language field: leaving logic aside, do you feel that "c" is better than "ts" to represent that sound?

 

 

 

 

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