More on Transcription November 23 2009 0 comments

The following is from the YR Chao 赵元任 interview I mentioned a while back.

At that time Hu Shih [胡适] spelled his name Suh Hu, instead of Hu Shih. “Shih” is the standard Wade-Giles spelling in the Chinese order. Suh Hu is the foreign order, with the last name last. The reason for that “h” is that it had an entering tone, and he was a student at Shanghai, where they had the entering tone, so “suh” really stands for the syllable [s[schwa]]; the “h” stands for the glottal stop [?]. But everyone called him Suh Hu.

Just in case anyone was still thinking it was odd to use h for something other than aspiration.







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