If it wasn't obvious from the title, this post is about Chinese names for foreign cities.
Recently I was with a friend traveling through Scotland.
When we're together we end up spending a lot of time talking about how weird the world is. We've both lived in lots of different countries, including various parts of Asia, Europe and Africa. So at this point, basically everything seems, relatively, weird.
During this trip to Scotland we started talking about Chinese names for foreign cities.
To understand why this topic is interesting it's important to note that Chinese is written using semantic characters.
Each character is a word, not a letter.
However each character is also a monosyllabic sound.
So the character 好 means good and is pronounced hao.
There are a bunch of other characters that are also pronounced hao, and they are differentiated from this one using special tones and context.
Anyway, there is no phonetic writing system in common use in China. There is a system called pinyin which people use when learning. But you won't find it written anywhere outside of that.
This means that things like maps just have characters on them. When you open Google maps, in Chinese, you're gonna see a bunch of characters.
Although each character is a word, in this case, on the map they're being used to make sounds which are kind of similar to the name of the town.
Take the town I grew up in, Gaithersburg.
The Chinese name for it, on Google Maps, is:
盖瑟斯堡
The pronunciation for that is gai se si bao. Get it? Kind of sounds like Gaithersburg, right?
Anyway, like I said before, these are all words, not letters. They might have monosyllabic pronunciations but they have complex meanings.
All taken this translation of Gaithersburg approximately means "Castle for a Zithern".
A Zithern is an ancient Chinese stringed instrument. Presumably many of them were secretly housed in Gaithersburg castle.
Anyway, obviously these characters were assigned for their sounds, not their meanings. But that's the interesting thing— there are thousands of other character combinations which would have had the same sound. How was this one chosen?
Or, better question: WHO was in charge or choosing? Like, how did Google decide that this was the Chinese translation for Gaithersburg? Someone, presumably the first Chinese speaker to visit Gaithersburg wrote home about it, or blogged about it, and the characters they chose to use for its name spread around? Were there, at one point, competing spellings? The sounds "gai se si bao" could also be translated into something along the lines of "Everchanging Colorful Death Bag". Was that a competing name for Gaithersburg at one point?
And Gaithersburg is a relatively large city. There are Chinese names for cities in the middle of nowhere!
Maybe there are competing, Chinese travel bloggers who journey far and wide in search of unnamed western cities which they can choose the name for. I've never heard of them, but seems like it would be a fun gig.
Anyway, to my Chinese readers, can you solve this mystery? How does Google or Baidu choose the characters used for western cities? Can I propose a new name for Gaithersburg?
Ep 59: Castle for a Zithern