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

ekkilu@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

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".

I would say the proper way to say that in Chinese is
美幣 18 元 <mei3bi4> 18 yuan or
歐幣 87 元 <ou1bi4> 87 yuan

similarly
加幣 11 元 <jia1bi4> 11 yuan for Canada
叻幣 22 元 <le4bi4> 22 yuan for Singapore (叻 comes from
"selat", Malay for "strait")

RMB 人民幣 literally means "people's currency" or "money issued by
the people". This was designed to contrast names used by the
KMT government such as 法幣 "legal money" -- as opposed to illegal
money issued by the warlords, 金圓卷 "gold coin bills", etc.

The same construction applies to unofficial names as well:
偽幣 33 元 33 yuan in "counterfeit money"[*]
匪幣 44 元 44 yuan "bandit money"[*]

[*] 偽幣 ("counterfeit money") was what CCP used to call money
issued by the KMT government; and 匪幣 ("bandit money") was
what the KMT used to call money issued by the CCP government

they are often shortened to "18 Meiyuan" and "87 Ouyuan".

I would not say that "18 X<unit>" (in Chinese) is the short form of
"X幣 18 <unit>". They are two different ways of stating monetary
quantities in Chinese. For most currencies, both forms are equally
common.

Note that in the West, the name of the currency is always the unit,
unqualified ("Mark") or qualified ("Deutsche Mark", "Reichsmark",
etc); whereas in Chinese, the name of currency is different from
the unit.

You don't do
that with Renminbi, that is, people don't say "25 Renminbi", because
Renminbi is currency name, not currency unit.

Yes you can say "25 Renminbi", in _English_; because English
speakers are used to treating currency name as the unit name.

The difference in the format/style of currency names has a
counter part in personal names -- some cultures have a "surname"
that is part of a person's name; some have a patronymic; some
have both and some have neither. When a person from the last
category is asked of his "full name", he may have to "translate"
his name to the "name surname" format to fit the expectation of
the enquirer. In a very much similar way, Renminbi can become
the unit (in English). Or we can say that the name of the
currency is "Renminbi Yuan", or more accurately, "Renmin Yuan".

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

Tak
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