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Yangon

This is the capital city of Myanmar (Burma). It was known thus before the British came. Anybody know why the Brits chose to call it Rangoon? Does the Burmese 'y' sound like an 'r'?

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Re: Yangon

> Does the Burmese 'y' sound like an 'r'Who knows - you Brits had seriously hearing problems!Mumbai - perceived as "Bombay"Myanmar - perceived as "Burma"Beijing - perceived as "Peiping" (and later...

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Re: Yangon

Myanmar/Burma and Yangon/Rangoon are discussed here. A pronunciation guide is attempted. WG's remarks re: dialect and politics seem spot on. The Wikepedia entry for 'Myanmar' gives some interesting...

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Re: Yangon

Nicely explained, wg, and that's an excellent link, dm.

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Re: Yangon

Saying the current version, written in the Roman alphabet, is correct, and all other versions are necessarily wrong, is a peculiarly un-linguistic thing to do.They're transcriptions of native names in...

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Re: Yangon

Yangon specifically: it's [ja~gou~] with two nasalized vowels, both with low level tone. The oral vowels of Burmese include a plain monophthong [o] but no diphthong [ou]; on the other hand the...

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Re: Yangon

The first syllable of all these is bei3, that is bei in the third tone, which means 'north'. The initial consonant is a voiceless unaspirated stop like the English [p] in 'spay', which is almost...

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Re: Yangon

I have been totally upstaged! I shall never speak of Asian matters again!!!!While I've got your ear, tho - could you please explain where "Hong Kong" and "Canton" come from? The former corresponds to...

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Re: Yangon

Ack! You've asked about all the ones I left out because I didn't know.Sri Lanka/Ceylon: different names, I think. 'Sri' is an honorific, Ceylon is an old name, as is Kandy and Taprobane. Unrelated to...

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Re: Yangon

This is a bit of a stretch, but not more so than many of WG's monolingual mishearings: Could it be "Kansai"? The EB says Osaka (and Kobe) are in "the Kansai, one of Japan's traditional cultural areas....

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Re: Yangon

I would shout "D'oh!" at this point, were it not for the fact that much of this occured to me while I was offline. Let's call it a "4-hour partial pip".Kwanji - as I said, "...if I've got that right"....

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Re: Yangon

Apparently Kansai and Kwansei are two different schools. Kansai University is in Osaka proper, and "Kwansei Gakuin University" (which I take to mean "Kwansei University University") has campuses in...

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Re: Yangon

Can't help with the sei/sai bit, but kwan is a borrowing from Chinese. In earlier forms of Japanese it was kept as such, but modern Japanese disallows kw-, and it would now appear as k-.

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Re: Yangon

Some pages like this seem to treat them as synonyms. I wouldn't be surprised if they were an etymological doublet, perhaps even alternate transliterations of the same ideograph.

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Re: Yangon

No, no, no, no, no - you were right the first time! "Kwansei" is definitely "Kansai", word-wise. If they are different schools, the devil is in the details which follow - Just as "Boston University"...

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Re: Yangon

I hang out with a couple of guys from the Sushi Bar at the supermarket where I work on a regular basis. They understood my speak-as-I-read pronunciation of Yangon the first time I said it; they also...

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