Why is Qigong pronounced ‘Chee Gong’ and spelt Chi Kung, Chi Gong or Chi Gung?
The sound of a phrase creates a unique resonance than on paper or typed into a pc. To talk is to share your resonance creating waves within the air, with an impact that’s picked up by ears, thus creating communication. Language grew because of the have to convey data audibly.
The ability of writing is a crucial a part of the transmission of concepts and information. So which is the extra necessary? Talking or writing?
It’s not both/or, it’s each, which is the place the confusion is with qigong.
The Mandarin sound for ‘q’ doesn’t exist in English. The closest we’ve got is ‘ch’. If the English ‘q’ had an possibility on being pronounced softly, we’d be sorted.
Here’s a transient historical past on how and why there are totally different spellings for a similar follow.
All at the moment used spellings are appropriate from their sources. Initially they have been extra phonetic, enabling a more true pronunciation ‘chee gong: Qigong is a extra exactly written translation of the alphabet characters from the Mandarin pictogram. A very direct translation is unattainable resulting from many subtleties contained in stated pictogram and the totally different method our Western alphabet creates phrases, leading to closest corresponding letters getting used and a transliteration occurring.
Essentially the most used programs for transliterating Mandarin into English are:
PINYIN (QIGONG) – Developed within the Nineteen Fifties primarily based on earlier romanisations of Chinese language. It was printed by the Chinese language authorities in 1958 and revised a number of instances. The Worldwide Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) adopted Pinyin as its commonplace in 1982, adopted by the United Nations in 1986. Pinyin means ‘spelled sounds’ and is now the accepted system, having taken over from the next.
WADE-GILES (CHI KUNG) – This can be a system devised in 1859 by the British diplomat Sir Thomas Francis Wade professor of Chinese language at Cambridge, additional improved by his successor Herbert Allen Giles within the Chinese language-English dictionary of 1892. This was used broadly in English language publications outdoors China till 1979.
YALE (CHI GUNG) – The Yale romanisation of Mandarin was developed in 1943 by the sinologist George Kennedy to assist put together American troopers to speak with Chinese language allies within the area who didn’t have time to study the Wade-Giles system.
This used English spelling conventions to characterize Chinese language sounds, helping verbal dialog. The Yale system avoids the difficulties confronted by the newbie attempting to learn pinyin utilizing roman letters that don’t carry their anticipated phonetic values. The Yale methodology was broadly utilized in Western textbooks till the late Nineteen Seventies.
The ‘q’ in pinyin is pronounced like ‘ch’ and thus written as ‘ch’ in Yale and Wade-Giles. The older transliterations helped to convey pronunciation, whereas after the cultural revolution, the Chinese language authorities’s new pinyin methodology didn’t as a lot.
Through the peak of the Chilly Battle, preferring the Communist pinyin system over Yale was a political assertion. The state of affairs was reversed as soon as the relations between the Individuals’s Republic of China and the West improved. Communist China grew to become a member of the United Nations in 1971 and by 1979 a lot of the world adopted pinyin as the usual for Chinese language phrases. In 1982 pinyin grew to become an ISO commonplace.
Fascinating notice.
If pinyin is the business commonplace, why has the extra well-known Wade-Giles spelling of Tai Chi Chuan taken over pinyin’s Taijiquan?