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>>The Chinese people don't leally cale about Google. So I do not undelstand why we talk so much about this. Just my 50 ct.

Oh, lord.

It's the Japanese (mainly) that have the R/L confusion. Mandarin has distinct R's and L's. Their r sound is a little funny, hind of like a "rrreh" sound (http://www.mandarintools.com/sounds/ri4.aif or http://www.mandarintools.com/sounds/rang4.aif). Cantonese speakers commonly confuse L and N, though they can have trouble with R's as well (confusing it with W). However, they usually get exposed to R via Mandarin or British English, so the problem isn't as prevalent.

Please, if you're going to mock a race, at least make sure you get it right. It'd be like making fun of the British for bombing Hiroshima.

It's

http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/wordlook.pl?word=%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4%BB%B6&searchtype=chinese&where=whole&audio=on

liu4 si4 - 6 4 i.e June 4th
shi4 jian4 - incident

It's officially Tiananmen in Pinyin

http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/charlook.pl?searchmode=standard&printtype=utf8&chartype=all&ordering=frequency&display=char&display=radstroke&display=strokes&display=pinyin&display=english&display=variants&display=unicode&english=&pinyin=&cantonese=&enctype=utf8&whatchar=%E5%A4%A9%E5%AE%89%E9%96%80&searchchar=Search+by+Character&lowerb=&upperb=

I wonder what the name means in Chinese.

Hsiao Mei (Wade Giles a deprecated but still common Romanization method in Taiwan) = Xiao3 Mei4 in Hanyu Pinyin = little sister.

http://www.mandarintools.com/cgi-bin/charlook.pl?searchmode=standard&printtype=utf8&chartype=all&ordering=frequency&display=char&display=radstroke&display=strokes&display=pinyin&display=english&display=variants&display=unicode&english=&pinyin=&cantonese=&enctype=utf8&whatchar=%E5%B0%8F%E5%A6%B9&searchchar=Search+by+Character&lowerb=&upperb=

...but I didn't realize the last one was the character for Vietnam. It normally means to wake or cause.

Doh, nope! :) Actually, it's not the character for "wake" or "cause", i.e. okiru or okosu, but rather the character for "exceed" or "pass through", as in the Japanese words koeru or kosu.

FWIW, the old name for Vietnam in Japanese seems to be "etsunan", which I guess is pretty close phonetically.

The etsu part in Japanese is pronounced yuè in Mandarin Chinese (link). The "u" is kinda pinched in pronunciation, such that the sound isn't all too far from a tight viet pronunciation. I have a sneaking hunch the pronunciation in Cantonese would be even closer to the Vietnamese.

The nan or nam morpheme shows up in a lot of Asian place names, and usually means "south" -- Hainan, Vietnam, Nanjing, Shônan, etc.

So the name for Vietnam (as written in Chinese characters, at least) ultimately means something like "deep south" -- about right, geographically speaking, from a Chinese perspective. :)

Cheers,

Its just that the Chinese have a thing about death. Its not discussed in polite company. They avoid the number 4 because the way it is spoken it sounds like death.

You're thinking of the japanese language - "shi" means "four" or "death" depending on the character used to spell it.

It also sounds like 'to die' in Chinese.

'Si' (Pronounced Like The Si in 'Sir') in the four sense.
'Si' (Pronounced Like The Si in 'Sir?' The difference in pronumciation is the tone with this one going down in the middle and ending up like a question, and the Si in four just going down in tone like a statement.) in the death sense.

Here is a list of all the things Si can mean.

Numbers in Chinese often sound like words, here's a wikipedia entry on it.

Its just that the Chinese have a thing about death. Its not discussed in polite company. They avoid the number 4 because the way it is spoken it sounds like death.

You're thinking of the japanese language - "shi" means "four" or "death" depending on the character used to spell it.

It also sounds like 'to die' in Chinese.

'Si' (Pronounced Like The Si in 'Sir') in the four sense.
'Si' (Pronounced Like The Si in 'Sir?' The difference in pronumciation is the tone with this one going down in the middle and ending up like a question, and the Si in four just going down in tone like a statement.) in the death sense.

Here is a list of all the things Si can mean.

Numbers in Chinese often sound like words, here's a wikipedia entry on it.

Its just that the Chinese have a thing about death. Its not discussed in polite company. They avoid the number 4 because the way it is spoken it sounds like death.

You're thinking of the japanese language - "shi" means "four" or "death" depending on the character used to spell it.

It also sounds like 'to die' in Chinese.

'Si' (Pronounced Like The Si in 'Sir') in the four sense.
'Si' (Pronounced Like The Si in 'Sir?' The difference in pronumciation is the tone with this one going down in the middle and ending up like a question, and the Si in four just going down in tone like a statement.) in the death sense.

Here is a list of all the things Si can mean.

Numbers in Chinese often sound like words, here's a wikipedia entry on it.

That's not correct, Mandarin words are by no means monosyllabic. What you probably mean is that unlike in Japanese, Mandarin characters are all monosyllabic. In Mandarin however words does not equal characters.

Also there are characters in Mandarin that have different pronunciations depending on the context.

Regarding the punniness of the language however it is my understanding that you are correct. Punning is said to be very common among those who speak the language far better than I do.

Yes, there are projects dedicated to this kind of thing going on. CEDICT: Chinese-English dictionary http://www.mandarintools.com/cedict.html is available. Also, several IMEs are percolating on Sourceforge if anyone is interested, and I think the majority of them build their data off of CEDICT.

Mind you, the database that Google was playing with was probably larger and more current. It may have also had some fields to allow the program to better determine which character combinations belong to which "word" using some kind of frequency calculation. I believe this being the art to making a good IME. However, public Chinese pinyin resources are definitely available so I think it was just Google being lazy and sloppy.

On a side note, here is a question that I have never known the answer to. Why do countries that have such dissimilar languages (the US and China or Russia for example) all use the same roman numeral numbers?

I would point out that some cultures still have their own numeral systems, but if you've read the first wikipedia reference, above, you will see why that would be pointless.

>> 1000 million Chinese can't be wrong

> I know it was a joke, but I doubt that 1% of that figure has enough money to buy a computer.

However, 10 million users is still a respectable chunk of mindshare, if not market share.

"All your user base are belong to us." -- Mao
The Mandarin Chinese word "mao1" means "cat"; look it up here