The pronunciation of polyphonic character is usually deduced from the semantic of the context. In a transliterated word, there is no such context, the character only stands for its pronunciation, so it seems not a good idea to use polyphonic characters for that purpose.
However they are used in transliteration. For example 什
is extensively used for Russian names. More interestingly, there seems to be an agreement that in transliteration, its less common pronunciation shi2
is always used instead of the more common shen2
.
So my questions are, in transliteration field,
- Is there any guidelines around/against using polyphonic characters?
- How does one decide which pronunciation is the 'agreed' one to use?
- Is there any polyphonic character, of which multiple pronunciations are used for transliteration?
shen2
, the actual character is甚
as in甚麼
. The Middle Chinese pronunciation of 什 isdzyip
, and there was no -n or -m ending pronunciation. Still in Korean and Vietnamese today, 什 has only one pronounced with -p ending. The natural descendant of this pronunciation in today's mandarin is `shi2'.jiao
is 白读 andjue
文读; for 薄,bao
is 白读 andbo
文读. Which is which concerns Middle Chinese pronunciation. Usually 文读音 is used in translation, that's why Berlin is 柏林 (bo2 lin2
) although the usually pronunciation of 柏 (the name of the tree) isbai3
.