Why do we as Americans?

Question

Choose to spell foreign words differently when translating from their alphabet to the English alphabet? For example, why do we spell it qua'ran instead of koran. Also why do we spell kung pao chicken instead of kung pow. These languages have no english alphabet so when we translate those "sounds" into the english language, why do we feel compelled to spell them so differently? Are we trying to make them sound more sophisticated? Just curious.

I dont think it is laziness. It takes as much energy to spell it one way as it does another. My point is that if the word originates from a language with no english alphabet, it is pretty much up to us to decide how it will be spelled. Then why do we choose to ignore the normal english spelling rules when spelling these words? Where the hell did the appostraphe come from?

Open, dialects are different strains of the same language. Chinese and english are not the same language.

Answer 1

Well, the thing is, ever since the Great Vowel Shift, the English language has had more than one way to spell the same sound. The problem is that many languages have transliterations based on the IPA, Latin, or the other Latin alphabet based languages. We can see that type of stuff in many cases for us. Remember our own alphabet was once like those languages and had those sounds as well.

The interesting thing is, although English has vowels which aren't commonly pronounced as their ancestoral and foreign forms, many English speakers can tell when a word is not natively English, and go into a secondary spelling form. It's after the secondary form comes, that the new one does.

Answer 2

English is crazy with pronunciation, word meet and meat sound the same so why it's written different - you would easily figure from the sentence what is it about. Very crazy for ESL students. In my language you write exactly how you pronounce it. And yet - most Americans have great problem with spelling simple words so do forget about chinese words, lol.

Answer 3

I would say it is just being lazy about getting outside of themselves and learning something new.
In this country, different areas pronounce the same spelled word differently, IE creek is also pronounced as crick but it is still a steam.
I think the biggest fault is with the news commentators, they kill words.


Not every one learned to spell using phonetics, so we grasp.

Answer 4

Concerning Koran and Qua'ran, the "k" sound of Koran is not identical to out "k" so they use a "q" instead. The other funnily transliterated words might have similar explanations.

Answer 5

well it's not just forien words but English it's self, such as lite or the proper light. there are tree resons for this: first to shorten up words. Second to make forigen word transelate into they way you prenouse the word and third just to be a bit different and to distiguesh your spelling of it.

Answer 6

Transcription has a source language and a target language. Example : a transcription from chinese into german will look different than a transcription from chinese into english.The differences you describe might be due to different transcription systems which describe certain sounds by different letters.

Answer 7

Because people from this country are too lazy to translate all the foreign words.

I know, I feel your pain too.

Answer 8

It's because of dialects. When one native Chinese speaker says "moo shoo", and another says "mu shu", and another says "mushoo", you get different transliterations.

Answer 9

so we can pronounce them easier