Re: intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over bopomofo (for Chinese)??

On Mar 28, 4:20 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Every country in the world assigns a name to its own currency (plus
names for the subdivisions). Why are the Chinese so arrogant as to
think it's ok to replace those names with the name of its own currency
for referring to them?

They don't. The name of the currency is Renminbi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renminbi
.. The unit of currency is Yuan. The meaning of the word "yuan" is best
understood as "integral monetary unit". "Yuan" is NOT the name of the
currency in Chinese. To be precise, in Chinese texts and in Chinese
speech, people would use something like "Renminbi 25 yuan", or "Gangbi
33 yuan" for Hong Kong dollars, or "Sintaibi 46 yuan" for New Taiwan
Dollars. Colloquially, "yuan" often is substituted with "kuai" or
"kuaiqian", so you will also hear "Renminbi 25 kuaiqian".

"Yuan" is used in compound words to denote many foreign currency
names. Like "Meiyuan" for US dollars, "Ouyuan" for Euro. Although it's
proper to use expressions like "Meiyuan 18 yuan" or "Ouyuan 87 yuan",
they are often shortened to "18 Meiyuan" and "87 Ouyuan". You don't do
that with Renminbi, that is, people don't say "25 Renminbi", because
Renminbi is currency name, not currency unit.

In short, "yuan" alone is not a proper noun. It's a common noun.

-- Ekki

.

Relevant Pages
Quantcast