icetea > writes:

> anyone know when they started(i mean some not all) this spelling
> "puer". from what i see on old wrappers, tickets or boxes the tea is
> is usually spelled "puerh". i only found one example that was spelled
> "puer".

I suspect it has to do with the gradual advance of Pinyin as a
standard for transliterating Chinese characters into western
alphabets. In the western media, for example, you hardly ever see
"Peking" any more as the name for the city. (As the name for the
university, yes, but...) By the way, do you know where the H in
Pu-erh came from originally? It isn't Wade-Giles, is it?

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html
recent addition: Da Man Zhong

On 2009-07-14, Lewis Perin > wrote:
> I suspect it has to do with the gradual advance of Pinyin as a
> standard for transliterating Chinese characters into western
> alphabets. In the western media, for example, you hardly ever see
> "Peking" any more as the name for the city. (As the name for the
> university, yes, but...) By the way, do you know where the H in
> Pu-erh came from originally? It isn't Wade-Giles, is it?

It looks like the final represented as 'er' in Hanyu Pinyin in W/G *is*
'erh' (though with a circumflex on the e; can't do 8 bit charactes on
this).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade-Gi...on_with_Pinyin

w

> *By the way, do you know where the H in
> Pu-erh came from originally? *It isn't Wade-Giles, is it?

Yes, I'm quite sure it is Wade-Giles transliteration. My older Wade-
Giles Chinese English dictionaries list it as such. I hate Wade-Giles.

On Jul 15, 12:50*am, niisonge > wrote:
> Yes, I'm quite sure it is Wade-Giles transliteration. My older Wade-
> Giles Chinese English dictionaries list it as such. I hate Wade-Giles.


I hate pinyin. And Chinese homework.
More than Xinyang Maojian ...

> I hate pinyin. And Chinese homework.
> More than Xinyang Maojian ...

Pinyin is handy. It's far much harder to associate sounds with
characters when you're not given any kind of transliteration system
that makes sense. And it's much easier to type when you know pinyin or
guangdong pinyin. I always had to learn characters the hard way by
memory - without any kind of tranliteration.

> Pinyin is handy. It's far much harder to associate sounds with
> characters when you're not given any kind of transliteration system
> that makes sense. ( ... below ... )
> I always had to learn characters the hard way by
> memory - without any kind of tranliteration.

The only way which worked for me (or nearly worked). Characters
(symbols) carry meaning and any transliteration only approximates
pronunciation. Pinyin (to me) was and is reading (approximate)
phonetics, wade giles the same, and since Chinese is a language with a
very limited number of common phonemes any transliteration reads as
abstraction. But ...

> And it's much easier to type when you know pinyin or guangdong pinyin.

Why it's useful. Computer age. More and more Chinese are learning
pinyin by default as a result!

And I am actually not so against a decent Xinyang Maojian, Jim ...

ImT

The Immoral Mr Teas > writes:

> > Pinyin is handy. It's far much harder to associate sounds with
> > characters when you're not given any kind of transliteration system
> > that makes sense. ( ... below ... )
> > I always had to learn characters the hard way by
> > memory - without any kind of tranliteration.
>
> The only way which worked for me (or nearly worked). Characters
> (symbols) carry meaning and any transliteration only approximates
> pronunciation.

Sure, characters often carry some meaning, but rarely the *whole*
meaning. And the phonetic components of characters, where they exist,
are often an imperfect guide to pronunciation. To take just one
example, the glyph for Bai2 (white) is the phonetic component of Pai1
(to pat.)

In a way, the problem is similar to the problem of spelling in
English, where words' spellings crystallized at various times in the
last several hundred years. Real-world pronunciation, though,
continued to change, leaving us English speakers with spellings that
are bitterly mocked by nearly everyone except native speakers with a
gift for spelling.

In Chinese characters, I think the problem is even worse. The
characters were codified, for the most part, long before English
spelling was, and since then both the pronunciation and the semantics
have drifted.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html

I dont know whats worse, learning to spell English if you are a
Chinese speaker, or the brute force of learning the meaning of roughly
two thousand characters to become literate in Chinese if you are an
English speaker. After that they are combined into n-tuples to form
other meanings.

Jim

On Jul 21, 8:05 am, Lewis Perin > wrote:
> The Immoral Mr Teas > writes:
>
> > > Pinyin is handy. It's far much harder to associate sounds with
> > > characters when you're not given any kind of transliteration system
> > > that makes sense. ( ... below ... )
> > > I always had to learn characters the hard way by
> > > memory - without any kind of tranliteration.
>
> > The only way which worked for me (or nearly worked). Characters
> > (symbols) carry meaning and any transliteration only approximates
> > pronunciation.
>
> Sure, characters often carry some meaning, but rarely the *whole*
> meaning. And the phonetic components of characters, where they exist,
> are often an imperfect guide to pronunciation. To take just one
> example, the glyph for Bai2 (white) is the phonetic component of Pai1
> (to pat.)
>
> In a way, the problem is similar to the problem of spelling in
> English, where words' spellings crystallized at various times in the
> last several hundred years. Real-world pronunciation, though,
> continued to change, leaving us English speakers with spellings that
> are bitterly mocked by nearly everyone except native speakers with a
> gift for spelling.
>
> In Chinese characters, I think the problem is even worse. The
> characters were codified, for the most part, long before English
> spelling was, and since then both the pronunciation and the semantics
> have drifted.
>
> /Lew
> ---
> Lew Perin /