The sheet inaccurately matches Hanzi with letters from the Roman alphabet. The character for “three,” as an example, was matched with “E,” ostensibly because of the vague resemblance between the two symbols, while the character for “person” was matched with “V,” because the two share the same basic shape, albeit oriented in opposite directions. To get more news about chinese alphabet, you can visit shine news official website.
Hanzi characters and their adaptations are notably used in written Chinese and Japanese, among other languages. The system of writing is logographic, meaning that characters represent specific meanings, not just sounds, as in an alphabetic writing system.
“My 3rd grader came home with this today from school, excited to show me how he’d written his name in Chinese. I had to gently explain to him that this is, uh… extremely Not Correct,” the tweet reads. The post has accumulated 67,000 likes and more than 6,000 shares at the time of this writing. The original poster explained their son had a genuine interest in learning about written Chinese.
“I explained as best I could about how characters/hanzi actually work, and my son was interested; he especially wanted to know about names how he’d actually write his own in Mandarin, so if anyone knows how you’d transliterate Silas what the characters would mean, please hmu!”
The World Health Organisation has been accused of bowing to China by skipping a letter in the Greek alphabet when naming the new Covid variant.
The agency on Friday announced that it would be calling the new strain Omicron – jumping over the letter Xi, which is also the name of China’s premier Xi Jinping.
The WHO said its decision was based on Xi being a ‘common surname’ and to avoid either ‘stigma’ or the risk of causing offence to ‘cultural, social, national, regional, professional or ethnic groups’.It has already been accused of overseeing a whitewash inquiry into the origins of the pandemic in the Chinese city of Wuhan and of ignoring evidence suggesting it may have started in a laboratory there.
President Xi is famously thin-skinned and is even said to have banned the character Winnie the Pooh in China after critics pointed out his resemblance to the bear.
The WHO began naming new variants after characters in the Greek alphabet rather than by the place in which they emerged in May on the basis that they are ‘easy to pronounce and non-stigmatising labels’.
When the new B.1.1.529 variant was revealed last week, Nu and Xi were the next available letters in the Greek alphabet. The WHO skipped Nu to avoid confusion with the word ‘new’ but also avoided Xi.Omicron is the fifth mutation to be named as a variant of concern. Other variants – such as Epsilon, Lambda and Mu – were categorised as ‘of interest’ so went largely unnoticed outside the scientific community.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz tweeted: ‘If the WHO is this scared of the Chinese Communist Party, how can they be trusted to call them out the next time they’re trying to cover up a catastrophic global pandemic?’