{"id":5121,"date":"2011-11-12T14:06:02","date_gmt":"2011-11-12T06:06:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=5121"},"modified":"2018-08-28T16:11:45","modified_gmt":"2018-08-28T08:11:45","slug":"not-the-same-sound","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2011\/not-the-same-sound\/","title":{"rendered":"Not the same sound"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s New York Times<\/em> exhibits one of my pet peeves. (Yes, I do seem to have a lot of those.) <\/p>\n

This particular one is the practice of declaring that some Mandarin word or expression has “the same sound” as something else — even though it doesn’t. Claiming that the Mandarin words for death<\/em> and four<\/em><\/a> sound identical is a frequent example of this.<\/p>\n

So today we have this: <\/p>\n

Consider Tide detergent, Taizi, whose Chinese characters literally mean \u201cgets rid of dirt.\u201d (Characters are important: the same sound written differently could mean \u201ctoo purple.\u201d)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nope. The Mandarin name for Tide detergent is Tàizì<\/span>. On the other hand, “too purple” would be “tài zǐ<\/span>,” which is close but not<\/em> the same. <\/p>\n

Tàizì ≠ tài zǐ<\/span><\/div>\n

So, the answer to the question “When is a homophone not a homophone?” is “When it’s not a @#$%! homophone.” <\/p>\n

But I will give the Times<\/em> points for not mentioning wax tadpoles.<\/p>\n

source: Picking Brand Names in China Is a Business Itself<\/a>, New York Times<\/em>, November 11, 2011<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s New York Times exhibits one of my pet peeves. (Yes, I do seem to have a lot of those.) This particular one is the practice of declaring that some Mandarin word or expression has “the same sound” as something … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12,28,95,32,127,105],"tags":[697,680],"class_list":["post-5121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-chinese","category-languages","category-linguistics","category-mandarin","category-tonal-languages","category-tone-marks","tag-homophone","tag-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5121"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5121\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7918,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5121\/revisions\/7918"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}