Xian=/=Xi'an

[Lockesdonkey]

Yeah. As anyone who speaks Chinese and understands Hanyu Pinyin can tell you.

One is 西安, one of the greatest cities of ancient China. The other is 先 (or 线， 县， 险， or &#36132, an everyday word.

I've done this for myself, but could Firaxis please fix this in the main game? Would it really kill you folks to do so? One dang apostrophe. Just take thirty seconds of your time.

 

[Thrar]

I know, but I doubt they will. You can change it in the XML though, and then it will always be called Xi'an on your computer.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

I know, but I doubt they will. You can change it in the XML though, and then it will always be called Xi'an on your computer.

Already done.

Well apostrophes don't really mean anything. My understanding is that you should just take a very short breath/make a very short pause there. Does it really make much of a difference? My understanding of Chinese (probably false) is that intonation can very the meaning of a word, however, because this doesn't exist in English, I don't see how it could be implemented.

Intonation does matter, but the apostrophe doesn't indicate the tone; that's indicated by marks above the vowels (in Hanyu Pinyin, anyway; see the Wiki article). The apostrophe indicates that you pronounce the word in two syllables (xi-an, /ɕi an/ in [wiki]IPA[/wiki]), rather than one (xian, /ɕiɛn/ in IPA); so in a sense, it does indicate a short pause. Think of it as the difference between saying "I diet" and "idiot" and you'll get the picture. It's really important, and it's nothing that English can't represent.

 

[Maniac]

Why do you care?

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Why do you care?

Because it makes a difference and takes less than half a minute to fix.

 

[PMabey]

Why do you care?

Wouldnt you if London was constantly spelt Londom in the game?



Actually maybe you wouldnt... but never mind.

 

[Maniac]

我知道。
That was just a reference to your location...

X-post

 

[Maniac]

Wouldnt you if London was constantly spelt Londom in the game?

Wouldn't you like to know?

 

[ChrTh]

Wouldnt you if London was constantly spelt Londom in the game?

I would've said "Wouldn't you if Gent was constantly spelt Ghent in the game?"

 

[Lockesdonkey]

我知道。
That was just a reference to your location...

Oh, that...I've studied Chinese for five years.

 

[Mewtarthio]

It's just a transliteration. Sure, you could include an apostrophe or write a diacritical mark to separate the syllables, but your average English speaker won't try to run "ia" into one syllable, so it won't matter. The important thing is that an English speaker knows roughly how it should be pronounced. It's the same deal with Hawaii: You can write it as Hawai'i if you really want, but most people who grow up in the United States know to separate the last two syllables anyway, so I've never seen the name written with the apostrophe in the continental US.

 

[Maniac]

It's just a transliteration.

No it's pinyin.

 

[sennomulo]

I would like to see tone marks too (Běijīng, Shànghái, Xī'ān, etc.), or even the original Chinese characters, but it's not going to happen.

 

[Sabretou]

Well, if Firaxis went abou fine-tuning city names, they'd have a lot of work to do. A lot of Indian cities, for example have outdated names. For example: Madras = Chennai, Calcutta = Kolkota, Bombay = Mumbai and so on. Delhi is, of course, Delhi.

 

[Thrar]

Regarding tone marks or chinese characters - does anyone know if it's possible? Technically, one could set the XML encoding to UTF-8 and insert those characters there - but does the game recognize and display them?

 

[Thrar]

Went out and tried - Civ4 doesn't like UTF-8 encoding for its XML files. However, I did find a pretty interesting (if old) thread on a similar topic (try the files in post #18!):

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=165035

 

[Lockesdonkey]

I would like to see tone marks too (Běijīng, Shànghái, Xī'ān, etc.), or even the original Chinese characters, but it's not going to happen.

I don't think that's possible or necessary. Shànghái is Shanghai in English. Xī'ān, however, has never been Xian in a truly respectable publication that does its homework.

Well, if Firaxis went abou fine-tuning city names, they'd have a lot of work to do. A lot of Indian cities, for example have outdated names. For example: Madras = Chennai, Calcutta = Kolkota, Bombay = Mumbai and so on. Delhi is, of course, Delhi.

Perhaps, but I think that Xi'an is justified by right of being the name in common use in English (again, by reputable sources), and by being such a minor departure. I could argue that Thebes ought to be Niwt (the name "Thebes" is Greek, "Niwt" is the original Ancient Egyptian name), or that "Cologne" ought to be "Köln," I'm not going to because these names are not in common English usage (of course, the story is different in other language editions of the game; I would never tell a German to call Köln "Cologne"). We're talking common English-language usage here, so I'm a bit leery about using the new Indian names, since I'm not sure how much they're used outside of Indian English (if, of course, they're used to any significant degree, I'd cry out for their use as well, but again, I don't really know how much they're used.)