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by notShabu 454 days ago
The romanization of these names is always confusing b/c stripped of the character and tone it's just gibberish. "Hunyuan" or 混元 in chinese means "Primordial Chaos" or "Original Unity".

This helps as more chinese products and services hit the market and makes it easier to remember. The naming is similar to the popularity of greek mythology in western products. (e.g. all the products named "Apollo")
3 comments
Y_Y 454 days ago
I think it's particularly egregious that they use such a lossy encoding. I can't read the hanzi, but at least "Hùn yuán" would have been more helpful, or even "Hu4n yua1n" would have enabled me to pronounce it or look it up without having the context to guess which characters it was representing.
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currymj 454 days ago
Tone markers are of limited use to Chinese readers (instead, just show them the characters).

They are also of limited use to non-Chinese readers, who don't understand the tone system and probably can't even audibly distinguish tones.

So, it makes sense that we get this weird system even though it's strictly worse.

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powerapple 454 days ago
Yes, this is very annoying, because how Pinyin works. There were a lot mistakes made when using Pinyin in English content. Pinyin suppose to break at character level, Pinyin = Pin Yin, you can easily write it as Pin-Yin, or Pin Yin, but Pinyin is just wrong.

Hun Yuan is a lot better. I agree, with unicode, we can easily incorporate the tone.

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realusername 454 days ago
I don't understand why this vietnamese-style writing isn't the most popular pinyin. It's clearly superior to putting numbers inside words.
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jiehong 453 days ago
Agreed. We all have a duty to respect languages and their official transcription. Pinyin with tones does not look much different from French with accents. In both cases, most people aren’t likely to pronounce it correctly, though.

The irony is not lost on me that Tencent themselves did that.

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klabb3 454 days ago
> The naming is similar to the popularity of greek mythology in western products. (e.g. all the products named "Apollo")

Popular? So you’re saying that all the VPs who have come up with the mind bendingly unique and creative name Prometheus didn’t do so out of level 10 vision?

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