In many books about Confucius' Analects, 大學 is transliterated as Ta-Hio.
Why is this? 大學 is dàxué
in Pinyin, da hsüeh
in Wade-Giles, da sywe
in Yale, and daai hok
in Cantonese, so where does this transliteration come from?
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Sign up to join this communityIn many books about Confucius' Analects, 大學 is transliterated as Ta-Hio.
Why is this? 大學 is dàxué
in Pinyin, da hsüeh
in Wade-Giles, da sywe
in Yale, and daai hok
in Cantonese, so where does this transliteration come from?
It's Mandarin transliteration by Portuguese Jesuit Fr. Inácio da Costa (17th century).
Partial text:
“大学之道,在明明德,在亲民,在止于至善”
Ta hio chi dao, cai min min te, cai cin min, cai chi yu chi xen
It's just the pinyin of a dialect for 大學.
-k
in 學). The initialh-
in 學 indicates that it's either from a time before the palatalization of Mandarin initial consonants (roughly 200-400 years ago,hi-
andhü-
became modern Mandarinxi-
andxu-
), or from a dialect that wasn't affected by palatalization (with which I'm not familiar). However, a Google search for "Ta Hio" seems to result in many citations of Ezra Pound, who is a relatively modern author. I don't know whether the term predates Pound though.Ta Hëŏ
, which is close.