How to say: Bao Xishun
15:45 UK time, Friday, 30 March 2007
A weekly guide to the words and names in the news from Eva Liina Asu-Garcia of the 91Èȱ¬ Pronunciation Unit
The world’s tallest man Bao Xishun (pronounced: BOW (to rhyme with "now") SHEE SHUUN (to rhyme with "book")) has married a woman 25 years his junior and about two-thirds his height. Mr Bao’s bride Xia Shujian (pronounced: shi-AA shoo ji-ENN) comes from his hometown Chifeng (pronounced as: CHUH (to rhyme with "the") FUNG (to rhyme with "rung")) in Inner Mongolia.
Mr Bao was in the news last December after he used his long arms to save two dolphins by pulling out plastic from their stomachs in Liaoning (LYOW (to rhyme with "now") NING) province, North East China.
It has to be noted that Chinese is a tone language and every syllable in Mandarin Chinese, for instance, can have four different pitched tones (high level, high rising, low falling-rising, and high falling) and a neutral tone. The meaning of a syllable changes depending on the tone used. The rendering of Chinese tones in English is of course impossible since English is not a tone language.
(For a guide to our phonetic pronunciations, click here.)
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