![]() The most prominent example I can think of is that the confusing and unnecessary practice of every country in the world having a radically different name for every other country. There’s a similar issue with the less accurate (but more familiar) romanization of the Tao Te Ching - spelling it with a “t,” but pronouncing it with as “d.” In contrast, the Pinyin version is less familiar for now, but much more clear for English pronunciation: Daodejing.Īnd for what it is worth, the minor learning curve necessary to familiarize English-speakers with the more accurate and authentic transliteration of Yijing and related words is worth it, both because it is important, whenever possible, to calling things what the original culture calls them, but also because - if you will allow me a very brief rant - I have long thought that it is a spectacularly bad idea for every language in the world to have a different name for geographically-and-culturally-specific terms. And in Pinyin, the title of this world religious classic is Yijing, which avoids the confusion of spelling the English word with the first letter “I” and pronouncing it with a hard “e,” but it has the problem that at least for now English speakers tend to much more easily recognize the word I Ching than Yijing. In recent decades, the Pinyin system (literally “spelled-out sounds”) which was developed by the Chinese people themselves, has become the new standard. As you can perhaps guess, Wade and Giles were not Chinese they were British sinologists. ![]() That more familiar I Ching spelling comes from the transliteration process known as the Wade-Giles system, which started in the 19th-century and was popular through most of the 20th-century. ![]() ![]() But in the English-speaking world that leaves us with the dilemma of choosing the best transliteration among the current options, none of which are fully adequate.įor instance, long before I took my first religious studies class, when I first saw the title of this Chinese religious classic written out as I Ching, I assumed it was pronounced “ EYE-Ching.” And this was years before Apple started putting an ironically lower-cased “i” in front of all its products, which has only made the traditional English rendering even more confusing: making it more likely that the uninitiated will pronounced the title EYE-Ching instead of E-Ching. If you understand Chinese, the simplest approach would be to render the word I Ching in Chinese characters. But before proceeding much further, I should clarify a few major issues of nomenclature, spelling, and pronunciation. ![]()
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