How to transcribe the name of the ruler of the PRC
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This is a follow-up to "How to pronounce the name of the ruler of the PRC" (10/26/25). Surprised by the amount of dissension over how to pronounce his name and how to represent the pronunciation in romanization, I decided to try another approach. I asked all of the students (undergrads and grads) in my Fiction and Drama and in my Language, Script, and Society in China classes to write down the best way that could think of to transcribe Xi Jinping's in roman or Cyrillic letters — other than the official Hanyu Pinyin version, Xi Jinping.
Only two of the students were linguistics majors, about a dozen were East Asian Languages and Civilizations majors. The remainder were drawn from a wide variety of disciplines and fields (humanities, sciences, and social sciences) across the university. About 90% had a Chinese background (ranging in ability from minimal acquaintance to full fluency). There were a couple of students from Taiwan, a few from Cantonese and other topolect areas, one had a Korean background, and two or three had no prior exposure to any East Asian languages.
About half of them had some familiarity with Pinyin, but I told them not to use Pinyin or be influenced by Pinyin in drawing up their proposals.
All of the students have native or near-native competence in English
Here are the results of the survey of those who attended class that day:
1. Shee gee pee-n
2. Shi Ginping
3. She-tsin-ping
4. Shee jihn-ping
5. she jeen peen
6. she jean ping
7. She gin ping
8. She Jean pin
9. hi dgiŋ Phiŋ
10. Tsi Jen Ping
11. se-zing-ping
12. shi chin ping
13. See jing Ping
14. sh-e ji-ping (hold your tongue in the sh position and move it up a bit)
15. See Jin Ping
16. see jin ping
17. She-Jin-ping (she as in her)
18. I tell my Hispanic friends "Si", but my American friends say "C". I say the jing ping pair rhyme with zing.
19. cee jing ping
20. htsee jin ping
21. shee zhing ping
22. She Qin Ping
23. she-jing-ping (as in ping pong)
24. Щи джин пинь
25. Си Дзиньпин (Dungan)
26. Си Цзиньпи́н (official Russian transcription)
N.B.: Within a week or so, I will make a new post on Dungan and explain how it is that we have a Dungan speaker at Penn this year.
P.S.: Yesterday, I heard a television newscaster repeatedly pronounce "Xi" as "Gee".
Selected readings
- "How to pronounce the name of the ruler of the PRC" (10/26/25)
- "How to say 'Xi Jinping' en français" (4/16/18) — very short, but it makes me laugh every time I hear it. Must watch / listen. "Sissy Ping".
- "Sino-Russian Transcription and Transliteration" (9/17/08)
- "Putin in Russian, Mandarin, and English" (1/21/18)
Dave J. said,
November 4, 2025 @ 9:02 pm
Did nobody suggest Hsi Tsin-p’ing, or would the Wade-Giles transcription be cheating?
Victor Mair said,
November 4, 2025 @ 9:26 pm
They never heard of Wade-Giles.
Bei Dawei said,
November 5, 2025 @ 1:45 am
I vaguely remember some TV person pronouncing it as "Eleven Jinping" (mistaking "Xi" for a roman numeral)
Andreas Johansson said,
November 5, 2025 @ 2:46 am
From the perspective of getting furriners to pronounce things approximately correctly, it might have been a good idea to merge x j q and sh zh ch as sh j ch, and write the empty rhyme as something else than i. You'd have to distinguish more systematically between u and ü.
So, by that logic I guess Shi Jinping.
Jarek Weckwerth said,
November 5, 2025 @ 3:18 am
Forgive the bluntness, but what we learn from this experiment is that (1) English speakers have trouble representing the name in writing, (2) there is considerable variability and (3) these students didn't consider the task from a pragmatic perspective of what a good transcription is. We already knew (1) and (2).
This is like asking someone who can walk to design footwork for tennis. Or asking someone who has a disease to design a test for it. The old story of "is an elephant a good zoo manager".
If we wanted to find out what a good transcription would be*, then we would have to design a bunch of transcriptions, ask many people to read them, and then analyse their pronunciations.
And from the previous post we know, for example, that a good transcription should use for the second consonant since it's more unambiguous.
(*) Unless we are looking for people who will be making transcriptions. Then this was a good test if we know what a good transcription is beforehand.