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I'M NOT A LINGUIST IF ANYONE CAN SUM THIS UP BETTER PLEASE DO SO AND I WILL EDIT TO OP 
So, ever since winning G-League, XiGua's name has been popping up a lot in discussions and casts, and he's widely known as China's best Zerg player in SC2. Of course, being a Chinese name, XiGua can be pretty fucking hard for westerners to pronounce, and I really don't enjoy it when his name is mutilated by people attempting to talk about "Zeegoah." This is a quick and dirty pronunciation guide.
Obviously, it's pretty fucking hard to approximate tones foreign to English on text for readers attempting to read words in anglicized tones, so for most people I advise just using the simplest pronunciation for his name possible, Watermelon. Yep, that's what his name means in Chinese. Wasn't that easy? :p
DISREGARD THAT I SUCK COCKS: LISTEN THIS INSTEAD:
http://translate.google.com/#en|zh-CN|watermelon
For those who actually want to attempt the Chinese pronunciation, it's something approximately close to the "shee" in "banshee," rising in tone, and "gwah."
But wait, why don't the Chinese just write it as Sheegwah and save English speakers a lot of trouble? Well, Pinyin is an Romanization, not an Anglicization. Its rules don't conform at all with English pronunciation, because English is only one of many languages using the Roman alphabet.
![[image loading]](http://nerdmeltla.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/the-more-you-know.jpg)
 
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what a bad blog
you pronounce it 西瓜, not "xigua" or "shee gwah"
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Reading this blog reminds me of how curious I was about the correct pronunciation of "XiaOzl". How would that be pronounced anyway ?
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On August 16 2011 17:19 SarR wrote:
Reading this blog reminds me of how curious I was about the correct pronunciation of "XiaOzl". How would that be pronounced anyway ?
its pronounced 小子
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I'm Chinese. It's pronounced See (monotone) - Guu-ah (monotone)
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On August 16 2011 17:37 saritenite wrote:
I'm Chinese. It's pronounced See (monotone) - Guu-ah (monotone)
Sh sounds -> s tends to be a Southern Chinese variation from what I've heard, and isn't standard Mandarin.
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Foreigners will still pronounce it wrong because they don't know tones.
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United States2626 Posts
It's see guu-wah. All chinese characters are 1 syllable mind you
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I find it mostly being Americans acting as ignorant as they usually are who can not pronounce Asian names/words. If you would all move to Sweden instead of US you would be able to keep your Chinese names instead of changing to something Western just because people can't pronounce your real name. :-D
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On August 16 2011 17:40 Kraznaya wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 17:37 saritenite wrote:
I'm Chinese. It's pronounced See (monotone) - Guu-ah (monotone) Sh sounds -> s tends to be a Southern Chinese variation from what I've heard, and isn't standard Mandarin.
Both work and both are standard. Different accents from different dialect backgrounds, but both are accepted as standard. But foreigners will have an easier time saying "see" rather than "shee".
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How about English speakers writing stuff like it is pronounced? We wouldn't have all those threads if you used the latin alphabet properly like (almost) everyone else
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OP is wrong, neither the xi nor the gua in xigua is rising in tone, they're both pronounced with a high, flat tone.
On August 16 2011 18:09 MaGariShun wrote:
How about English speakers writing stuff like it is pronounced? We wouldn't have all those threads if you used the latin alphabet properly like (almost) everyone else
even disregarding the fact that xigua is about as proper a spelling as it gets (minus the tones), you can't write out how they're pronounced using the latin alphabet because the latin alphabet doesn't contain all the sounds a person is able to make.
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5/5 for DISREGARD THIS I SUCK COCKS. Either you've reached the acceptance stage or your funny.
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best blog
its like a 2/10 thread though on /b/ -.-
+2 if you put in butthurt in every sentence
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OP is right, its a romanization, we swedes never have any trouble pronouncing it like its written. Seeing the anglified version of hangul makes me wanna puke since it is so off
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5/5 for admitting to sucking phallic groin growth :3
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On August 16 2011 18:09 MaGariShun wrote:
How about English speakers writing stuff like it is pronounced? We wouldn't have all those threads if you used the latin alphabet properly like (almost) everyone else
The latin alphabet? You don't really know how languages work, do you... Posting everything in the international phonetic alphabet, sure, that might work, but almost nobody knows it, and I'm not sure your average internet forum can handle all the diacritics needed for a tonal language.
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United States335 Posts
On August 16 2011 17:19 rauk wrote:
what a bad blog
you pronounce it 西瓜, not "xigua" or "shee gwah"
Saying that something is pronounced "西瓜" makes no sense, since the characters don't denote anything about pronunciation. In fact, there are several different correct pronunciations of 西瓜, as all Chinese dialects (really they are different enough to be separate languages) use the same characters. Romanization systems work by assigning a Roman letter or letters to each sound in the Romanized language. Therefore xīguā is a perfectly correct representation of how watermelon is pronounced in Mandarin Chinese, if you understand pinyin.
On August 16 2011 18:09 MaGariShun wrote:
How about English speakers writing stuff like it is pronounced? We wouldn't have all those threads if you used the latin alphabet properly like (almost) everyone else
Ignoring the implication that there is a proper way to use the Roman alphabet, the eccentricities of English spelling have nothing to do with why people don't intuitively understand how XiGua should be pronounced. The issue is that Romanization systems require some degree of training to fully understand. This is because, as I stated above, Roman letters are assigned sounds from the language being Romanized that don't necessarily correspond perfectly to their usual pronunciation. For example,"c" in pinyin sounds more like "ts," and I believe in other Romanization systems that sound is Romanized as "ts." Pinyin is by far the most common Romanization system for Mandarin though.
On August 16 2011 17:59 Sorkoas wrote:
I find it mostly being Americans acting as ignorant as they usually are who can not pronounce Asian names/words. If you would all move to Sweden instead of US you would be able to keep your Chinese names instead of changing to something Western just because people can't pronounce your real name. :-D
Don't be hatin on Americans. People of any nationality will have difficulty pronouncing names from languages they don't speak that use a very different set of sounds. A lot of people I know from China do use their Chinese name in the US. Of course that's just personal experience; I don't have the statistical information to make any broader generalizations about what proportion of Chinese don't use their Chinese names in the US or what their reasons are.
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On August 16 2011 18:07 saritenite wrote:Show nested quote +On August 16 2011 17:40 Kraznaya wrote:On August 16 2011 17:37 saritenite wrote:
I'm Chinese. It's pronounced See (monotone) - Guu-ah (monotone) Sh sounds -> s tends to be a Southern Chinese variation from what I've heard, and isn't standard Mandarin. Both work and both are standard. Different accents from different dialect backgrounds, but both are accepted as standard. But foreigners will have an easier time saying "see" rather than "shee".
What? Mandarin is the official dialect for mainland China and even Taiwan uses a variation of Mandarin (they call it Taiwanese). The "X" letter is pronounced "sh" in Mandarin. This is the standard and correct pronunciation, period.
Maybe it's pronounced "s" in Singapore but that doesn't make it standard; it's simply a deviation used by a geographically isolated population. To compare to the English language, you wouldn't call pronouncing the word "nine" in the southern drawl as "naaahhne" as standard, it's a deviation.
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EPT
