Showing posts with label currency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label currency. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Ringgit

Months ago I commented on how BBC reporters refer to the Chinese currency, the yuan /juɛn/ 元, as the /juan/ 'you-ahn', rhyming with 'one'. And this is despite the fact that they employ people trained in phonetics to research these things. The trend might be due to the fact that other people have started calling it the 'you-ahn', but it's not like a historic standard like saying 'Paris' with the final 's'. So what's the point then of hiring people to check these things anymore?

Today, I just saw another report on the BBC about inflation in Malaysia. The reporter pronounced the name of the national currency, the ringgit, as the /rɪŋɪt/ 'ring-it', without the voiced velar stop /g/. For people who are familiar with Malay and Indonesian, if the word was meant to be pronounced that way, it would be written 'ringit'. The velar nasal is written using the digraph 'ng', while the following velar stop is written with an additional 'g'. So, the currency really is the /rɪŋgɪt/ 'ring-git'.

I don't mind if news programmes completely anglicise the pronunciation of foreign names and currencies, but the BBC hires people to verify how to pronounce these names as close as possible to the source language.

Monday, November 1, 2010

Yuan

This is not a Nepal-related post, but just a little comment about this page from Johnson, featuring puns on the name of the Chinese currency, the yuan 元.

It has surprised me that even people on BBC World News (no link available unfortunately) pronounce it as 'you-ahn', rhyming with 'one', like all the puns suggest. In fact, it should be pronounced closer to 'U-N', but as a single syllable, i.e. /ɥɛn/ or /yɛn/. It's surprising because the BBC employ people trained in phonetics to research these things, so that they pronounce names as close to the native language as possible if there is no standard English pronunciation.

And it's even more frustrating for me to hear yuan being mispronounced - it's in my Chinese name.