Cross-language homonyms between English and Chinese

13 July 2020

The Chinese language has many different systems for phonetic transcription and which one to use is mostly a function of which variety of Chinese you are using, which country you are in, and when you learned it. Standard Chinese, the variety that is an official language of the People’s Republic of China, as well as (with small variations) Taiwan and Singapore, and which English speakers coloquially call “Mandarin”, has at least ten different systems of transcription. Almost all of these, aside from Zhuyin (注音) as used in Taiwan, are Romanizations, which use the Latin script. The most widely used Romanization today is Pinyin (拼音).

Like all varieties of Chinese, Standard Chinese is tonal. Pinyin uses diacritics over vowels to represent the four main tones of the language, for example:

When I’m reading English, I can’t help but look at some words – like “jingling” or “dangling” – and read them as if they were Chinese words written in Pinyin without the tone marks! Most English words that look like valid, toneless Pinyin are nonsense, but those two examples do correspond to real Chinese words: jīnglíng (精靈, a fairy) and dānglìng (當令, seasonal).

How many other English words have homonyms in Pinyin? I wrote a script homoyin to find out, which used:

• Chi-Hao Tsai’s list of valid Pinyin syllables
• the CC-CEDICT Chinese-to-English dictionary
• the words file on my machine

This revealed a total of 221 English words that could be read as a toneless, Pinyin word that is a phonetic spelling of a valid Chinese word or name. Some of them are loanwords from English, and so mean the same thing. Some words have many possible corresponding Chinese words, especially the single syllable ones. The results:

• en-pinyin-homonyms.txt, reproduced in the table below
• en-pinyin-nonsense.txt, which lists all English words that can be segmented into valid Pinyin, but which don’t correspond to a real Chinese word

There are some fun ones:

• emo → è mó → 惡魔 (demon, a good look for an emo)
• gong → gōng → 功 (meritorious deed or service, for which one could “get a gong”)
• gun → gùn → 棍 (a truncheon, a different kind of weapon)
• lie → liè → 劦 (unending exertion, which may be needed depending on the complexity of the lie)
• mocha → mǒ chá → 抹茶 (green tea, a different kind of drink)

The full list could be useful for cross-language punning!