transcription/romanization of Taiwanese 藝苑

[rice_t]

I am looking for a way to write 藝苑 with English letters, the main challenge is the 藝. The goal is to write it in way that the native English speaker can pronounce it more or less the "right" way.

Which one of those would you think comes closest to the original Taiwanese pronounciation:

ge-oan
ghe-oan
gae-oan
gue-one

Any better ideas?


By the way can anyone tell me why it is called transcription as opposed to transscription?

[Chris]

ge-oan is the official POJ spelling.

However, if you want to spell it in a way easy for English speakers, perhaps "gay wan".

[lupillus]

Not completely related, but I always think of writing the sounds of another language down in English as transliteration, and recording English speech down in English as transcription. Does anyone else feel this way?

I think English eliminates a lot of redundant Ss in the middle of words, two Ss seem to exist mostly at the end of words but they indicate a longer "s" sound rather than a short "s" sound: tigr"ess" rather than tiger"s".

So I think even though the word is trans + scription, the reason maybe the word has only one "s" is because we don't hold the long "s" in the middle.

[rice_t]

Thanks for the replies.

Chris, what do you think about gae-wan, or how would you pronounce it if you had to?

[Chris]

What's the purpose of this? The name of a business? Knowing the purpose and intended target readership will help us come up with better suggestions.

[rice_t]

Well, target readership, that is a good question. It is part of the name 合和藝苑 of an amateur nanguan group music an xiqu, not necessary too go into much detail here. They used Hap-Ho Academy" as their English name, but people from the department of cultural affairs have complained now that the group is not an academy. It is a long story, and I don't even know if I have all relevant information, so to cut it short, the group needs a name “in English”, and one option is a transcription of the Taiwanese. Anything will be better than the suggestion from the Dpt. of cultural affairs "HapHo Musical Group".

[adikarmika]

Anyone know of a converter that converts chinese characters to POJ?
I would have thought there would be one online, but I couldn't find anything.

[ironlady]

Using a Romanization -- especially a Taiwanese Romanization -- for the part of the name that actually has meaning in explaining what the group is/does doesn't seem like the best idea to me.

What's so bad about the suggestion in English? (I don't know anything about this group, BTW, but it sounds plausible and certainly it's not bad English.) Or maybe something like "Arts Ensemble"?