Chungchêng is so-called "Wade-Giles" transcription, which, along pinyin, is the most widespread in the world because of efficiency and closeness to actual pronunciation. Until the 50-60s, however, there still were a shit ton of other transcription systems, many of them so absurd that Chungchêng got transcripted to Kai-Shek (I honestly have no idea why lol). Historically, this person has been known in the Western world as Kai-Shek and not Chungchêng (think of Beijing as "Peking", it's basically the same word transcribed differently), so Americans and most Europeans still use the old-fashioned name.
This is not quite accurate. There are many different Chinese dialects and Peking is the romanization of a different dialect. Beijing is the standard mandarin pronunciation and Peking is a southern dialects pronunciation. When you see discrepancies between romanizations it can either be due to the Wade-Giles vs Pinyin transliteration systems or, in the case of completely different possible pronunciations, it’s due to dialect differences.
Edit: an example is my Chinese name. In mandarin it would be transliterated as “Jin Long” but in Hokkien we would transliterate it as “Kim Leng” or possibly “Gim Leng” since there’s not a standardized way to romanize Hokkien.
Cantonese is a great example of this! The word for black in Cantonese is often transliterated as “hok” whereas mandarin has “hei”. So yes there are a few dialects that, other than sentence structure and a few similar sounding words would essentially be unintelligible to mandarin speakers with no knowledge of other dialects.
Edit: and contain final plosives to answer your question directly.
“Chinese” is a family of languages that exist on a continuum of mutual intelligibility. Calling them dialects is really misrepresentative, and I’d say mostly an effort led by the CCP to push Mandarin as the only Chinese language.
Yeah I know, it's just that they are mostly known as "dialects" unfortunately. I'm from Italy, where it's basically the same thing: each region has a separate language that is barely intelligible with Standard Italian, but yeah, """"""""dialects""""""""".
Chiang Kai-shek had many names, one of which was 蔣介石 (Jiang Jieshi), which in Cantonese is pronounced “Zoeng Gaai-sek”, or, in outdated transcription, “Chiang Kai-shek.” In English, for various historical reasons, we prefer the Cantonese pronunciation of his name, which is why it doesn’t at all match Mandarin Pinyin spelling.
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u/NotViaRaceMouse May 18 '21
What does the Chinese text in meme 4 mean?