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I still hate pinyin, but I gave the wrong example
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(Updated)
My hatred for pinyin, the convention for rendering Chinese words in Western script, is undiminished. But a little while ago I used the wrong example to make the point. As readers Jake Fleming, Joshua Rosenzweig, James Roy, and others promptly pointed out, the Western spelling Urumqi, for a city's name that most Chinese pronounce approximately wu-lu-mu-chi, illustrates complications other than pinyin-ization.
My hatred for pinyin, the convention for rendering Chinese words in Western script, is undiminished. But a little while ago I used the wrong example to make the point. As readers Jake Fleming, Joshua Rosenzweig, James Roy, and others promptly pointed out, the Western spelling Urumqi, for a city's name that most Chinese pronounce approximately wu-lu-mu-chi, illustrates complications other than pinyin-ization.
Urumqi (it turns out!) is the Uighur spelling of the city's Uighur Mongolian* name, the Uighurs being a mainly-Muslim, Central Asian people whose stronghold in China is the Xinjiang "autonomous region." The spelling is a actually good approximation for how they would pronounce the name, with "qi" roughly as "chee."
The four-character Chinese name 乌鲁木
