Chinese respelling of the English alphabet
In China, letters of the English alphabet are pronounced somewhat differently because they have been adapted to the phonetics (i.e. the syllable structure) of the Chinese language. The knowledge of this spelling may be useful when spelling Western names, especially over the phone, as one may not be understood if the letters are pronounced as they are in English. (The letters that are pronounced differently – not counting tone differences – according to different sources are given in bold.)
| Letter | Spelling 1[1] | Spelling 2[2] | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 诶 | ēi | 诶 | ēi |
| B | 必 | bì | 比 | bǐ |
| C | 西 | xī | 西 | xī |
| D | 弟 | dì | 迪 | dí |
| E | 衣 | yī | 伊 | yī |
| F | 艾付 | àifù | 艾弗 | àifú |
| G | 记 | jì | 吉 | jí |
| H | 爱耻 | àichǐ | 艾尺 | àichǐ |
| I | 挨 | āi | 艾 | ài |
| J | 宅 | zhái | 杰 | jié |
| K | 开 | kāi | 开 | kāi |
| L | 饿罗 | èluó | 艾勒 | àilè |
| M | 饿母 | èmǔ | 艾马 | àimǎ |
| N | 恩 | ēn | 艾娜 | àinà |
| O | 呕 | ǒu | 哦 | ó |
| P | 披 | pī | 屁 | pì |
| Q | 酷 | kù | 吉吾 | jíwú |
| R | 耳 | ěr | 艾儿 | àiér |
| S | 艾斯 | àisī | 艾丝 | àisī |
| T | 踢 | tī | 提 | tí |
| U | 忧 | yōu | 伊吾 | yīwú |
| V | 维 | wéi | 维 | wéi |
| W | 大波留 | dàbōliú | 豆贝尔维 | dòubèiěrwéi |
| X | 埃克斯 | āikèsī | 艾克斯 | yīkèsī |
| Y | 歪 | wāi | 吾艾 | wúài |
| Z | 再得 | zàide | 贼德 | zéidé |
Notes
The respelling of H mimics the standard aitch /eɪtʃ/ rather than the regional haitch /heɪtʃ/.
The respelling of Z mimics the British English zed /zɛd/ rather than the American English zee /ziː/ or the Hong Kong English variant izzard /ˈɪzərd/.
gollark: Oh no. Imagine if you did not have to rote-memorize things as much.
gollark: I mean, dedicated hardware devices for mathy stuff any general purpose computer can do literally thousands of times faster?
gollark: Well, calculators are triangular anyway.
gollark: I'm only missing advanced features like "lists".
gollark: I've managed to get somewhat sort of working markdown to virtual DOM conversion by using the parsing half of an existing Markdown library and a hacky renderer thingy running on the input tokens.
References
- Mandarin Phrasebook and Dictionary. Lonely Planet 2012, ISBN 9781743211977, p. 16
- Chinese Alphabet (MyLanguages.org)
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