Guest blogger Hemlock finishes his visit to Learning Cantonese with a paen to Hong Kong's most unlovable Liberal...

Are We Having Fun With Transliteration Yet?

He has been called a nematode, a spineless moron and a slimy idiot savant.  But I will rise above the fray and simply introduce him as James Tien, leader of Hong Kong’s Liberal Party.  

In political English the word liberal’ can mean pro-small government and free trade or (more recently, courtesy of the US) left-of-center.  Opposite meanings, almost.  (But what about the word ‘cleave’, which can mean to stick together or to pull apart?)  Since HK’s Liberals are pro-cartel (or ‘pro-business’ in the local parlance) they are clearly neither.  So maybe ‘liberal’ here is a transliteration, and the name in English is a six-letter word that begins and ends with the same letter and has four different letters in the middle.  Tyrant?  Damned?  Richer?  Edible?  (I am indebted to the Crossword Compiler program here.) 

Tien’s surname 田 means field, and would normally be transliterated as ‘tin’ in Cantonese or ‘tian’ in Pinyin.  Like Cardinal Zen, this loathsome ratbag – as some believe him to be, though I couldn’t possibly comment – was born in Shanghai.  At that time, the standard method of Romanizing Mandarin was the Wade Giles system, under which the (alleged) backstabbing and unprincipled invertebrate’s name would have been rendered as T’ien.  Not wanting to be mistaken for being Irish (my guess), the family dropped the apostrophe, leaving us with the Tiens of Hong Kong, who made a mint running textile sweatshops and whose scion is boss of the city’s most shallow, despicable and pitiful excuse for a political party.  Or not, according to taste.