Re: Urgent list question - anyone speak Chinese….?

On Fri, Nov 06, 2015 at 08:25:45PM +0000, Phillip Atcliffe wrote:
>I don't speak Chinese, but if this version of China is a direct
descendant of
>today's PRC, then a space force is quite likely to be called something
like
>the People's Liberation Army Space Force (PLASF), along the same lines
as the
>People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN), People's Liberation Army Air
Force
>)PLAAF) and People's Liberation Army Marine Corps (PLAMC -- are you
starting
>to see a pattern here?). To our ears/eyes, the names are peculiar, to
say the
>least, but the Chinese do it that way. So you could well have the
PLASF, or
>the PLA Space Marines (!), or the PLA Space Marine Corps.

It sounds weird (there's even a People's Liberation Army Naval Air
Force) because it's basically a mistranslation - as I understand it
the word used as "Liberation Army" (Jiěfàngjūn) would be closer to
"military force", it's just that when they started it they didn't have
much in the way of ships or aircraft and so they didn't feel a need to
say "ground forces" specifically. (See also the US Army Air Force.)

Roger