Let us look this time at some specific Chinese you can hear in radio broadcasts. I will group it into.....
Country
names
Frequency
announcements
Country names
Because of the limitation in syllable sounds, the Chinese language lacks a number of sounds common to other languages. Therefore non-Chinese names have to be adapted to the Chinese pronunciation. This is usually done by expressing the name in sounds common to Chinese, as close to the original sound as possible. With these Chinese sounds some beautiful characters are matched for writing purposes. The combination of characters may mean nothing at all: "qiao, ke and li" combined don't have a meaning. But when in China be sure to ask for "qiaokeli" and you are sure you get something resembling the sticky, brown stuff we call chocolate, (except a great deal less sweet, because the Chinese usually don't have a sweet-tooth).There aren't many of these loanwords in Chinese, except for countrynames, brandnames and names of persons. Countrynames usually end with the character guo2, meaning country, or the character lan2, sounding like the English word "land", but having the Chinese meaning orchid. Here some Chinese adaption for the most common names:
The Continents:
Asia = Ya3-zhou1
; America = Mei3-zhou1
; Africa = Fei1-zhou1 ;
Europe = Ou1-zhou1
; Pacific = Tai4-ping2-yang2.
Country names:
China = Zhong1-guo2
; Japan = Ri4-ben3 ; Mongolia
= Meng2-gu3 ; Vietnam = Yue4-nan2 ;
Canada = Jia1-na2-da4 ; U.S.A.
= Mei3-guo2 ; England = Ying1-guo2
; France = Fa4-guo2
; Germany = De2-guo2 ; Holland
= He2-lan2 ; Italy = Yi4-da4-li4 ; Spain
= Xi1-ban4-ya3 ; Russia = E4-luo2-si1
or E4-guo2 ; Australia
= Ao4-da4-li4-ya4 ; New-Zealand = Xin1-xi1-lan2
(said in mainland China) or Niu3-xi1-lan2
(said in Taiwan).
Frequency announcements
First of all let's learn to count in Chinese:0 = ling2 ; 1 = yi1 ; 2 = er4 ; 3 = san1 ; 4 = si4 ; 5 = wu3 ; 6 = liu4; 7 = qi1 ; 8 = ba1 ; 9 = jiu3 ; 10 = shi2 ; 11 = shi2-yi1 ; 12 = shi2-er4 ; 20 = er4-shi2 ; 21 = er4-shi2-yi1 ; 100 = yi4-bai3 ; 1000 = yi4-qian1 (Want to hear it? Click here)N.B. In mainland China there is one big exception: when saying a numbers in random order - like for example a telephone number - "yi1" is replaced by "yao1". This can be heard quite often in frequency announcements too.
Further to frequency announcements, the meter(band) is mentioned using either one of two loanwords for meter: "mi3" (used in mainland China), or "gong1-chi2" (used in Taiwan) and the decimal point is dian3 or diar3. For example: on shortwave 25 meter(band) (zai4 duan3-po1 er4-shi2-wu5 mi3) or 31.25 meters (san3-shi2-yi1 dian3 er2 wu3 gong1-chi2).
Frequencies are usually named digit by digit. The word for Hertz is "he4" and kHz and MHz are composed putting the word for thousand, or a million in front of it respectively. So kiloHertz becomes "qian1-he4" (For example: 11935 kHz - yi1 yi1 jiu3 san1 wu3 qian1-he4) and MegaHerts becomes "zhao4-he4".
So a typical frequency announcement would be something like this: "er4-shi2-wu3 dian3 qi1-wu3 mi3 (or gong1-chi2), yi1-yi1-liu6-wu3-ling2 qian1-he4" (25.75 meter, 11.650 kHz).
