--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:

> >
> > Certainly. E.g., I remember a lengthy article about how the

Chinese

> > translators of Harry Potter's books transcribed the names: they
> > carefully chose the characters(=hanzi) whose meaning hinted

about the

> > character(=moral quality) of each character(=personage) in the

novel.

When we performed Robin Hood in our ESL class last year we wrote a
brief summary of the story in Chinese. I asked an adult about how
to write Robin Hood in Chinese and I was told that there was no need
to find out how someone else had already translated it. I should
just ask the children to chose characters that would represent the
sounds in his name and then discuss which ones would best represent
what Robin Hood stood for.

So yes we had to find out which characters best represented the
character of each character in our play.

I am rereading an article by C.K. Leung on reading acquisition in
Chinese. (He writes extensively about dyslexia in Chinese readers so
probably not well known in this list.) However, he remarks that
understanding the fanqie principle provides a more powerful means of
pronouncing Chinese characters than the component phonetic radicals
or the use of heterographic homophones. He gives the impression that
there is a lack of understanding of the fangie priniciple in most
discussions of Chinese orthography. Unfortunately there is no
illustration of the chart in his article so I am glad to have found
one now.

C.K.Leung also refers to the "internal structure of characters
encompassing both meaning (morpho) and sound (phonemics)". I think
that this must be the origin of my much criticised use of the
term "morphophonemic" last summer, when I used the term with a
meaning other than the usual one (simply to describe units which
represents meaning and sound). For myself, I prefer to think of the
word morphophonemic as being able to have more than one meaning, but
I accept that others here don't - so no need to tell me this is
unacceptable.

Suzanne