I’m sure most folks have either noticed or heard the jokes about Chinese, maybe Asians in general, are frequently mispronouncing letters in the English alphabet. The most common, of course, are: L and R. Oh yeah, that reminds me of a Seinfeld episode on this very subject. Well, it turns out that there are good reasons for these mispronunciations. Just take a look at this picture.

I recently moved to a new apartment. A little background: I was lazy about moving from my old place even though I didn’t feel completely comfortable there.  When I found out that I had to re-register there for another visa, I figured that if I had to register, I might as well register in a new location. So, I moved to a new apartment complex where the quality of the components was much higher. I’ve got a view of the bay and the hills in Hong Kong. It’s much more pleasant. Anyway, the water heater is a “Rinnai”, which was translated as ?? in Chinese, which is “Lin” (tone 2) and “Nei” (tone 4). So, right away, the pronunciation is wrong. I woulda translated it as something like ??, which is “Ri” (tone 4) and “Nei”. But, then again, I’m not Chinese. I asked a few folks and the best answer I got was that this was the best choice of words. A word that starts with an “L” instead of an “R”.  I never got a good answer to “why”.

Often, the translations for English names choose words that have nice meanings. Of course, we foreigners don’t know these inner meanings unless we take the time to study the characters. For example, there’s a French supermarket that I go to called “Carrefour”. The Chinese translation is “Jia” (tone 1), “Le” (tone 4), and “Fu” (tone 2). The characters mean “Home”, “Happy”, and “Lucky”. So, I like to joke to folks that, “Hey, I need to go to ‘The House is Happy and Lukcy’ to buy some stuff.”