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

> On 7 Nov 2015, at 07:48, Roger Bell_West <roger@firedrake.org> wrote:
> 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”

Yes, our English terms PLA, PLAN, PLAAF etc. are artefacts of
not-very-wonderful literal translations. The People’s Liberation army
is 人民解放军 or rénmínjiěfàngjūn. To break that down,
rénmín means people in the sense of “We the people”, jiěfàng
means liberation, and jūn means army or more broadly military. The
Chinese airforce adds 空军 (kōngjūn), and their navy 海军
(hǎijūn), which are “air military” or “air force”, and “sea
military” or “sea-force” respectively. By extension, one would
expect a future “space force” suffix to be something like 天军
(tiānjūn) or 太空军 (tàikōngjūn).

Tàikōng is “outer space” (literally “highest sky”, and
shēnkōng is “deep space” (literally “deep sky”), which sort of
makes sense, since there’s no hard line between atmosphere and outer
space. I suppose the recent English coinage of “taikonaut” for a
Chinese astronaut is drawn from the first five letters of tàikōng.

RB

PS. My apologies to anyone whose e-mail client can’t render Chinese
characters or pinyin-with-tone-marks correctly.