Open / close sesame
Marvelous post in Pinyin News by Mark Swofford:
Pinyin, US trademark law, and myths about Chinese characters
芝麻 vs. ZHIMA
Posted on Sunday, February 5, 2023
The entire post, and the legal ruling that it reports, are of such importance in clarifying the interrelationships among language, transcription, and translation, especially for those who have an interest in the combination of legalistic and linguistic reasoning, that I will quote the better portion of it, starting from the beginning:
The Mandarin word for “sesame” is zhīma (written “芝麻” in Chinese characters). That’s all the Mandarin anyone will need to know for this post. But if any of you non-Mandarin speakers are curious, an approximate pronunciation would be the je in jerk + ma (with the a as in father).
OK, let’s get into it now.
Read the rest of this entry »