Rant

I was going to write a post on being annoyed at mispronunciation (I guess I still am). Then I tried to write the title and found that "pronounciation" is incorrect. So I went and checked it up, and sure enough pronunciation is the correct spelling. Then I read through a couple of forums and see that people have posted that hearing people say "pronounciation" makes them wince and grit their teeth. Which made me a little pissed off, because I say pronounciation.....spelling-wise, it just looks better having that o in there....and from a consistency point of view, it makes sense to have it in there.

I guess where I differentiate between the arseholes that......fuck, you going to underline "arsehole" too? Where do I change it off American English? Anyway, there are obviously different acceptable spellings for words in different parts of the English speaking world....and different ways of pronouncing them as well.....Ahah! "Pronouncing" wasn't underlined....it just makes no damn sense to have "pronunciation".  

What really annoys me is when people regularly mispronounce words that come from other languages. I mean words that they say everyday and have heard everyday and should know how to pronounce. For example, why do some English news presenters still refer to the current president of the US as "Barrack Obama (with bama pronounced like it is in Alabama)". I mean, we've only heard his name 50 zillion times before. If you can say "shark", you can say Barack correctly....and if you insist on pronouncing it "barrack", then you have no business being on television presenting the news.

Another thing that had me seething... Kanban, is a Japanese word (and is pronounced "Kahn bahn") that has been appropriated by these business process improvement types. You want to do kanban to help business reduce waste and become more efficient, fine. But pronounce it properly. I went through 45 minutes of hell a couple of months ago, listening to an Australian "kanban" expert explain how he'd helped businesses implement "can ban" (pronounced like you would say "I can ban you from abusing the Japanese language like that"). If you really are such a fucking expert, why not take 5 seconds to learn how to pronounce it correctly?

People who want to seem like they know something about China will drop the word "guanxi" on you. That's fine, whatever....but if you talk to a Chinese person in English about it, they will most likely use the word "relationship"....because they are talking in English. Why not use the word "relationship" as well? The way most English speakers pronounce it, it is harder for native Chinese speakers to understand what you are talking about when you say "Gu-Anne-Shee" than it is when you say "relationship". If you were speaking in Mandarin, then "guanxi" is fine....mostly because the words before it and after it would be in Mandarin as well....and hopefully with reasonable pronounciation.

Beijing rhymes with paging....not pronounced Beige-ing.

I could continue this rant by moving onto Wade-Giles romanization.....and  I will. Chinese is hard enough for people to learn without adding in apostrophes in weird places and having double consonants that are the wrong way around. I get that it was invented years ago....but why use it or other variants of it now? Thank you is 谢谢, which is "xie xie" in pinyin, and something like "hsieh hsieh" in Wade-Giles. Which looks more daunting? Some people like the Wade-Giles because it brings back a sense of nostalgia... but apart from pleasing sinophiles longing to return to 1920's Shanghai, it is just a more confusing and less useful way of learning Mandarin. I drive my car to work and not a horse-drawn carriage because it's a lot easier and more convenient. Glad that Taiwan has finally moved away from it. Now to move everyone on to using simplified characters as well. I get hand cramps just looking at how many strokes are in some of the characters in traditional Chinese.