It’s connected to the uneven transition of place names from the old Wade Giles system to Hanyu Pinyin, a process that started (as far as I know) when Ma was mayor of Taipei (hence “Xinyi Road” and not “Hsinyi Road” in Taipei).
Don’t get me started on the use of Tongyong Pinyin used in selected other municipalities in the early 2000s . . .
It’s not though. I definitely wouldn’t put that “y” in there if I was trying to write it phonetically for a native English speaker. That would make me want to say the completely wrong sound.
I think our disagreement here stems from you reading these letters as a Taiwanese person and me reading them as a British person (albeit one who’s somewhat familiar with how “Hsinchu” etc. are supposed to sound).
It then comes down to who the romanization is intended for - people who can already read the characters and don’t need the romanization, or people who can’t and do?
Yeah, and what’s your point with posting the dictionary definition and nothing else?
You didn’t write “ˈfyük-sən” in any kind of standardized phonetic notation, you wrote “‘fyook-sin’ or ‘fyook-sun’”, which means that people read it in the way they normally read words. You can’t just take the first two letters from the IPA notation, ignore the rest, and act like that demonstrates your point.
I also said “write it phonetically for a native English speaker”. Outside of language teachers, linguists, etc., the average native English speaker on the street isn’t going to have any idea how to read IPA, and they’re not going to read “fyook-sin” in the way you’re suggesting they would/should.
It’s not really necessary - if you’re unable to back up what you wrote or respond properly, you don’t need to bother.
My post before last was intended to be conciliatory (that we’re simply reading the letter combinations differently), but posting a screenshot of IPA notation (which you weren’t using) is a pretty low-effort response. Some of your posts really make me question your critical thinking abilities, and this was one of them tbh. (The last one I remember was probably one of those dubious lists featuring Taiwan or a Taiwanese city you like to post, or that time you misread an in-text citation as a ridiculously large negative exponent.)