Some years ago I bought the
X-Men 2 DVD, which has Chinese subtitles, so that I could watch it multiple times, possibly without audio, to practice reading Chinese characters. One X-Man's name is Scott, which is transliterated into Chinese as 史考特 (Shǐkǎotè). This is one of those instances wherein an English
s sound is transliterated into a Pinyin
sh sound, which always seems a tad odd to me. 蘇珊 (Sūshān) for Susan is another (okay, okay, that second
s in Susan is pronounced like a
z in English).
I found 3 additional transliterations of "Scott" in
Chinese dictionary apps which used the Pinyin
s sound instead of the Pinyin
sh sound:
- 司各特 (Sīgètè)
- 斯哥特 (Sīgētè)
- 斯考特 (Sīkǎotè)
The Pinyin
ka sound (e.g., 卡 kǎ) may have been a better choice for the second Pinyin syllable. However, the original transliteration might not have been into Mandarin, but into a different Chinese dialect, in which the sound of the character was indeed closer to the English sound.
Anyway, in Flushing, NY, I saw an office's large bilingual streetfront sign asserting wide acceptance of the Pinyin
sh transliteration:
ScottTrade 史考特證券
(Shǐkǎotè zhèngquàn; Scott "negotiable securities", i.e., stocks and bonds)
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