Cultural training quote of the day 26 December 2007
“Mao Yu (pronounced “miao” without the “i” and a really harsh “you”), or Alice, as she is called, 28, comes from Chong Qing (pronounced “ch-oe-ng” and “ch-ing”), a small municipality in the heart of China with over 30 million people.”
Nice try at educating the readers, but they perhaps should have thought about the negative implications of the words “really harsh” before printing that one.
It goes on:
“She has studied English since she was 12 years old and, if one were to communicate with her, one would almost think she was a native English speaker.
“I was teaching English in China when I got the opportunity to take part in this program,” said Alice. “It required at least three years prior English teaching experience. The whole process happened really fast. When I was recruited, they sent me to BeiJing (capital of China and pronounced “bay” and “jeeng”) to have an interview. Luckily, the interview went well.”"
This is obviously written by a small town journalist, and possibly one who was taking the piss because his editor keeps on telling him to keep his intellectual stuff out of a small town paper, but here goes with some gross generalisations about a couple of American cultural pointers here anyway. I have no idea how much the American public needs to have the capital of China and its pronunciation spelled out to them, but it does seem to happen a lot in the American media. I’ve also never understood the point of giving a pronunciation guide with English spelling when English spelling is so variable that one spelling could have several pronunciations. Also doesn’t happen in the UK, for better or worse, perhaps because the BBC change how they pronounce foreign place names every couple of years or so…
Thanks to Google alerts for bringing this one to me from here.