Who are you calling a pussy?

Michael Phelps, that's who. And it's the Chinese that are doing it, not me.

The WSJ had this article last month on the bizarre 'Chinese names' accorded to some of the famous foreign athletes in the Olympics.

America's multiple medal-winning swimming sensation was rendered (in pinyin, the system for representing the sound of Chinese characters using the Roman alphabet; I couldn't tell you what the characters are) as: mai ke er fei er pu si. That's pronounced, roughly: MY-KER-ARR FAY-ARR-POO-SUH.

Not really very close, is it? Of course, Phelps's name presents particular problems for 'translation' into Chinese. The language doesn't really have any final consonants; so these have to be rendered by whole syllables with a consonant-vowel combination. Hence Phelps, with his unfortunate cluster of three consonants at the end of his surname, ends up with a Chinese version of it that is a staggering four syllables long rather than the simple monosyllable of the original. Oh yes, and then there's the problem with the letter 'l'. Although Chinese does have an 'l' sound, it seems that its 'r' sound (which is not rolled in the back of the throat, and is thus strangely close to the English 'l' sound) is usually preferred for representing the English 'l'. Hmmm, but a final 'r' sound - which we have in this er syllable (and at the end of almost every syllable in Beijinghua - a phlegm-gargling throat-rattle is the most distinctive characteristic of the capital's accent) - is more rolled, less liquid, so.... it really makes no sense twice over. Why not use the 'l' sound of li or le or lu? Why not use the liquid 'r' of ri or rou? Using er is just bonkers!

It seems to me to be one of the most serious shortcomings of the Chinese language that it is so woefully incapable of accurately rendering the sounds of other languages (thus making it difficult to adopt words from other languages, and almost impossible to recognise and pronounce names of places and people in other languages). And it is one of the gravest failings of the education system here that almost nothing is done to remedy this deficiency: although most Chinese study English, and are reasonably familiar with the English alphabet (which is in some circumstances used alongside Chinese - for example in addresses, where buildings or staircases are often differentiated as A, B, C, D), no attempt is made to teach children the Roman alphabet spelling of names of famous people or places, or the main rules of pronunciation for the major European languages; and although Chinese kids are taught how to pronounce their own language using international phonetic script, no use seems to be made of this for teaching them how to pronounce foreign names.

No, the Chinese seem to rely solely on this bizarre system of transliterating these names into Chinese characters - which often leaves them completely unable to recognise the actual names of, for example, Audrey Hepburn, Albert Einstein, or Nelson Mandela; and completely unable to communicate about such people in English with native English speakers, because the Chinese versions of names like these are often so garbled as to be quite unrecognisable. I have come up against this problem time and time again in teaching in Chinese universities and businesses, and it drives me potty.

By the way, in case you missed this last month, do check out the truly flabbergasting Michael Phelps diet - as detailed in The Guardian, amongst other places (their correspondent, Jon Henley, gamely tried it himself for one day!).