Firaxis needs to change Chinese cities naming!

[Mongoloid Cow]

Names like Canton are the ones most English speakers know. It may be wrong, butt the different systems make no sense to me as I still have know idea how to pronounce either of them

 

[Trade-peror]

That may be true, but the situation won't improve if the mistakes are not corrected!

Also, I might not know how to pronounce many of the Aztec or Portuguese city names, but that doesn't mean I should simplify them to something that I can pronounce.

 

[Xen]

That may be true, but the situation won't improve if the mistakes are not corrected!

Also, I might not know how to pronounce many of the Aztec or Portuguese city names, but that doesn't mean I should simplify them to something that I can pronounce.

if your a US citizen, its your god-given right to simplfy any and all names to somthing you can pronounce

 

[Trade-peror]

if your a US citizen, its your god-given right to simplfy any and all names to somthing you can pronounce

I am a U.S. citizen, but I am also of Cantonese Chinese ancestry...

 

[chimo]

This is the reason why: When the british and other europeans first went to china they did so in the south of the country where they speak Cantonese, a form of chinese. The names, Peking for Beijing and Canton for Guangzhou is how the Cantonese pronounce it. When a chinese person pronounces Vancouver 'Wing Go Wah' or America as 'Mei Gok" in their language we don't complain so why should the chinese care how we say their cities in our language?

 

[Trade-peror]

True, but the basis of the English words referring to those cities are based on mimicking the way the Chinese say them, so there is reason for the Chinese (and Chinese Americans!) to be annoyed when the cities are not pronounced correctly.
It is analagous to Americans hearing bad English from someone who does not speak much English, but who also refuses to try to improve.

 

[Symphony D.]

The oddest thing is they use Beijing as the capitol and virtually every other city is Wade-Giles. Shouldn't the capitol be Peking then? Be consistent Firaxis!

I agree that they should convert entirely to Pinyin. It'd be nice if other cities were included as well; for example, Taiyuan, Wuhan, Fuzhou, none of them are included, and as I understand they're all big cities. This goes for the other civs as well.

 

[spicytimothy]

This is the reason why: When the british and other europeans first went to china they did so in the south of the country where they speak Cantonese, a form of chinese. The names, Peking for Beijing and Canton for Guangzhou is how the Cantonese pronounce it. When a chinese person pronounces Vancouver 'Wing Go Wah' or America as 'Mei Gok" in their language we don't complain so why should the chinese care how we say their cities in our language?

That's proposterous coz when we say Weng Go Wah and Mei Guok we're actually saying the official Chinese traslation that the Americans recognize. For example, USA is used to known as "Fa Kei" meaning Flowery Flag, for those early Chinese Americans who came to CA... and for that matter, Hawaii is "Tang Hurn Shan" and cisco is called "Gao Gum Shan" old gold mountain...

in other words your comparison is only valid if we call American cities by those names...



I also wanna say my original point of the threat was not only to promote Firaxis changing the names to PinYin, but in the very least make them consistent and update the list with cities that reflects modern China. I know some say it's good enough, but it really isn't when China is a modern-day country and the major cities can be researched on the internet in 10 minutes.
If they bothered to change Mao Zedong to Li Shi Min the first Tang emperor for the Taiwanese version of Civ3 I really don't think it's that much trouble to change their list of cities...



Better yet, why not release the lists of cities of all the civs to us eager forumers so we can proofread/make suggestions for them???

 

[Double Stack]

Like all Civilization games, you can rename them as you please. I don't think that will change in Civilization IV.

 

[spicytimothy]

Like all Civilization games, you can rename them as you please. I don't think that will change in Civilization IV.

not really the point of this thread my friend

 

[Old_Lion]

Why do french cities have english spelling ?

in French, Lyons is Lyon, Rheims is Reims, for example.

The name is different because of the long history linking France and England.

So you have to remain logic : spell cities name as it is the use in your langage. otherwise you're in for endless corrections.

(by the way, in french we call London Londres ans New Orleans la Nouvelle Orleans)

 

[tcjsavannah]

not really the point of this thread my friend

But it should be. It's like complaining about your car that won't start because it's out of gas and then blaming the car manufacturer.

 

[dc82]

Why do french cities have english spelling ?

in French, Lyons is Lyon, Rheims is Reims, for example.

The name is different because of the long history linking France and England.

So you have to remain logic : spell cities name as it is the use in your langage. otherwise you're in for endless corrections.

(by the way, in french we call London Londres ans New Orleans la Nouvelle Orleans)

well the problem isn't even that it's an english spelling of the city, ur analogy wud be correct if people were complaining that chinese wasn't used (北京, 上海, 廣東, 南京, etc.) in the city names.

the problem here is that firaxis uses outdated spellings and just plain incorrect names for cities. it's like having american cities named new amsterdam, idaho, montana, nouvelle orleans, new sweden)

problem is, again, nowadays, whether u go to an airport, look up a map that no longer calls russia the ussr, chinese city names r spelled in the new pinyin methods - peking is beijing, nanking is nanjing, canton is guangdong. and again, half the names that civ gives r provinces (like states) not cities (guangdong is a province, guangzhou is a city, xinjiang is a province, urumqi is the main city, etc.) again, u wudn't use florida or texas as a city name. that's just a gross error.

not that any one here prob. feels this way, but a reason y a lot of countries change or re-write their city names is because their original english spellings were often reflections of colonial rule - and so countries such as india, china, turkey, etc. have restored their official english city names to something closer to its true pronunciation.

 

[Novaya Havoc]

Eh, If I cared at all, I'd look more toward CIV4 using the old system of naming the Indian cities, ie. Madras instead of Chennai, Bombay instead of Mumbai, Calcutta instead of Kolkata, and so on.

I also hope they dump cities like Kiev, Riga, Minsk, Odessa, and so on back into the Russian cities list. They were part of the Russian empire for centuries.

-B

 

[Philips beard]

I want the good all names for those cities, and I want it the same way for the indian cities. Madras, Bombay and Calcutta are good names, bringing back the romantic feeling from the glorious age of colonialism!

 

[dc82]

romantic for some, age of imperalism and oppression for others. heh. XP

 

[Sullla]

Hmm, this does seem like something that should be addressed. It definitely makes no sense to have some names in Wade-Giles and others in Pinyin. Maybe if we make enough of a stink about this we can get Firaxis to make the change.

 

[Novaya Havoc]

Hmm, this does seem like something that should be addressed. It definitely makes no sense to have some names in Wade-Giles and others in Pinyin. Maybe if we make enough of a stink about this we can get Firaxis to make the change.

Ugh. Just change the names to whatever you'd like in the editor. I did it for Moscow = Moskva in Civ3, and it took me all of 1 minute.

 

[Ramalhão]

It's ironic that, on the other hand, they spell the religion 'Daoism', according to Pinyin, though the Wade-Giles transcription (Tao) is more common.

In Portuguese, daoism is "taoísmo", there isn't a word "daoísmo" .

"Canton" sounds most similar to a Romanization of the Cantonese Chinese word for the province of Guangdong, which contains the city of Guangzhou.

Romanization? Maybe "latinization" or even "portuguesation". "Canton" in Portuguese is "Cantão". I'm not sure, but maybe this name was created by portuguese navigators. Beijing in "Pequim" (which refers to Peking) and Nankim is "Nanquim".

We can't be sure how these names appeared, maybe someone wrote what undestood and passed for other countries, which made different translations. There's a child game here which can explains what I mean. Someone speaks a sentence to the next in a queue, which passes to the next. It goes until the last. When the last one hear, it's usually something very different of starting sentence.

By the way, there's a lot of Portuguese cities with different names. Lisbon is Lisboa and Oporto is only Porto. The word "O" here is an article, so saying "Oporto" means like "The Porto" for us .

People may remember that Ukraine asked for everyone change the spelling of some cities. The old Kiev changed to Kyiv.

 

[dc82]

There's a child game here which can explains what I mean. Someone speaks a sentence to the next in a queue, which passes to the next. It goes until the last. When the last one hear, it's usually something very different of starting sentence.

in the us we call that game telephone, where a message transmitted thru several people often ends up distorted and very different from the original. a more fun variation is to mix it with charades where each person has to act what the former person gestures w/o talking leading to the last person, who then guesses what it is based on the last person.

speaking of changes to city names, check out cnn.com: http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/africa/05/26/safrica.capital.reut/index.html