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To Boldly Go Where No One Has Gone Before

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jwhouk:
Can I just address the 800-pound Sehlat in the room?

I haven't watched much more than the trailers and the first episode of season 2, but I've already come to the conclusion that Discovery's Spock is... well, mirror Spock.

Not just because of the beard and all, but because of his actions.

Why isn't anyone focusing on this?

BenRG:
Because most Trekkers are getting used to the fact that DIS is a hard reboot in all but name and that they shouldn't expect any of the pre-ENT canon or characterisations to be used in the new show.

FWIW, the watch phrase for  the writers on this show appears to be: "Whatever it is, it must make Michael Burnham seem even more perfect."

Theta9:

--- Quote from: Akima on 25 Sep 2017, 02:23 ---
--- Quote from: Kugai on 24 Sep 2017, 19:54 ---YouTube Reviewer Emergency Awesome has just dropped a Non-Spoilery Review of Discovery after he Previewed the first two Episodes
--- End quote ---
And this guy can't pronounce Shenzhou. Shen-zoo? :roll: It is shen-joe! Not difficult! Unless you're just using Chinese stuff as set dressing, and don't care about getting it right.

--- End quote ---
Since written Chinese uses its own character set, it baffles me that we don't transliterate it into reasonably accurate phonetic pronunciation using the English alphabet as we do with Japanese. Where/how did we get "jo" being spelled "zhou"?

pwhodges:
Because it's not quite the same.  Don't assume that because we can't necessarily hear the difference ourselves it doesn't exist. 

For example, many Japanese cannot hear the difference between our "l" and "r", but that doesn't mean that we can't have that distinction even though they don't. 

There is a huge amount of subtlety in how the brain learns during the first year or so what differences in sound are significant in the language(s) the child is exposed to; differences which it finds not significant don't get programmed into the recognition network, and so can be incredibly hard to learn later.

Akima:

--- Quote from: Theta9 on 14 Feb 2019, 07:37 ---Since written Chinese uses its own character set, it baffles me that we don't transliterate it into reasonably accurate phonetic pronunciation using the English alphabet as we do with Japanese. Where/how did we get "jo" being spelled "zhou"?
--- End quote ---
It is from the Pinyin romanisation system that we get 神舟 romanised as Shenzhou, and pronounced roughly "shenjo".

(click to show/hide)Romanisation of Chinese is a difficult problem, but it is important to bear in mind for whom the romanisation scheme is designed. Is the romanisation designed to make it easier for foreigners to pronounce Chinese words, or is it designed simply to represent academically, in the Roman alphabet, the sounds of Chinese? If the scheme is aimed at foreigners, it will have to consider the sounds associated with the letters in the "target" foreign language, as well as the sounds in Chinese, and will therefore be specific to just one pair of languages. Consider how the letter J is pronounced differently in English, French, and German.

In Standard Mandarin Chinese, there are two sounds that are similar to the hard J (like at the beginning of jungle, jump, jester etc.) in English. In the Pinyin romanisation scheme, one is represented by the letter J, while the other is written ZH. I won't get into the technical difference here, which is only relevant to Chinese-speakers and CSL students. For the purposes of pronouncing Chinese words when speaking English, I recommend pronouncing both J and ZH like the J at the beginning of jingoism. :angel:

The Yale romanisation system, which was developed in 1943 at Yale University, for U.S. Army courses teaching Chinese to American soldiers, is an example of a romanisation scheme designed for the specific language "pair" of Chinese and English, using the normal English pronunciation of letters, but of course it doesn't work for other pairings. For example the surname Zheng could be romanised in Yale to Jung (hard J, and short U in English, like the first syllable of jungle), but a German would read that as "yoong" (like the psychologist), and a Frenchman as "ʒoong", and a Spaniard as "hoong". There simply is no Chinese romanisation scheme that would be intuitive for the speakers of all languages, and generally the world has settled on Pinyin as the "official" standard, but it requires study to use it correctly.

However, people manage to butcher the pronunciation of Chinese words, even when the romanisation is, or at least should be, intuitive. Consider the very common mis-pronunciation of Beijing as "Beige-ing". The correct pronunciation is "Bay-jing" (Bay as in "Bay at the moon", and Jing as in "Jingle bells") which uses quite standard English pronunciations of the letters. By contrast, "Beige-ing", gives the J a French-style pronunciation that is foreign to both English and Chinese.

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