Feng shui (pronounced "fung shway")..so why not write it as fung shway in the first place?

Question

for those smart alecs who recommend writing rendeyvoo, rryte, dikshunari or what not non sense, one thing: we know how to spell/pronounce them bcoz its standard English. My point is who amongst u peeps can, like, deduce what "Feng Shui" should really sound without hearing it spoken b4 ever?
I'd also like to hear those peeps calling me stupid to pronounce "qingqi".

Answer 1

Funny you should ask. We were talking about this only yesterday. We decided it's because the feng shui people need to know who's in the know and who the newbies are.

Answer 2

The pronunciation "fung shway" is actually an Anglicized version of a Chinese phrase. Chinese is usually written in Chinese characters, but there is an alphabet called pinyin which is often used to write Chinese with Roman characters. Since Chineses and English have different sounds, the pinyin system uses some letters to represent different sounds from ones that they usually represent in the English writing system. For example, the first vowel in "feng" is more like a schwa, but the letter "e" has been used because that's the letter used in pinyin to represent that sound, as opposed to the "u" that the English writing system would use.

I could point out that any writing system is usually an approximation of the pronunciation of a language and often does not contain all the phonetic information about the language that it's trying to represent. The English writing system is famous for having a lot of mismatch between the letters used to write a word and the sounds those letters are supposed to represent. For example, why do we write a word that sounds like "nayt" as "knight"?

Answer 3

How To Spell Fung Shway

Answer 4

Feng Shui is a Chinese word. It is actually written with the character for wind (feng) and for water (shui). However, China has adapted what is called pinyin or romanization - a way to use Latin based letters to spell out the sound of the character. It is used all over in Mainland China, while Taiwan still uses phonetic characters (bo po mo fo or zhuyin).

Answer 5

I'm not sure why so many people felt like insulting you on this one. I thought it was an interesting question and not at all the same as why "rendez-vous" is not spelt "rendayvoo".

Maybe it's bad luck to spell fung shway.

Answer 6

Because it's Chinese of course! What a crazy question...!

Frankly, 'fung shway' is probably not the best way to demonstrate the pronunciation anyway, and if you tried mentioning the subject to a native speaker of Chinese they probably wouldn't understand your 'accent'!
; )

Answer 7

Yu kan go uh-hed an rite it "fung shway" if yu wunt, but peepl will think yur stoopid.

Answer 8

Feng Shui is the chinese pinyin.
Pinyin is the romanisation of chinese charcters and is also how they enter their characters in to a computer.

Answer 9

Because it's not an English word.

Answer 10

fengshui is the pronunciation or pinyin used by china (people's republic of), instead of the old pinyin which taiwan still used. china used the alphabets to adapt the pinyin to make it easy for western people to study the language.

on the other hand, why not spell it that way? i mean, it is like asking why does "rendezvous" not spelled as "randayvoo". i believe that your question is stupid to start with.