> Not necessarily, a lot of Chinese names has several ways of spelling, since there are several different sinogram-to-latin systems.
Wow, I'm really straying off topic here, but...
I lived in china. I've seen the names of chinese cities spelled several ways, according to the romanization method (taiwan uses wade-giles, the mainland uses pinyin, but IMHO yale gives the least incorrect pronunciation from an english speaker on the first try) but taipei (pronounced "tie bay") has never been spelled that way in any romanization method I've seen.
Posted Nov 27, 2008 3:29 UTC (Thu) by oska (guest, #25556)
[Link]
> taipei (pronounced "tie bay")
Actually the consonant at the start of the second syllable is "between" what English speakers think of as 'p' and 'b'. It is a bilabial plosive that is voiceless like 'p' but unaspirated like 'b'. It is a common mistake for monolinguals to interpret latin letters in the way they are pronounced in their own language, not realising that they are often mapped on to sounds that don't exist (or are not recognised as distinct sounds) in their own language.