<p>Confucius is a latin transliteration as opposed to an English one. Etymology might be a good starting point: <a href="http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Confucius" rel="nofollow">http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Confucius</a></p>

<p>This article is probably highly relevant: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_China_missions" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_China_missions</a></p>

<p>Further reading: <a href="http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000ID3EIE" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/WINDOWS-INTO-CHINA-JESUITS-1580-1730/dp/B000ID3EIE</a></p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-05-08T12:42:41.567Z
2013-05-08T12:42:41.567Z
juckele
<p>I'm interested in the romanization system, or similar systems to, the one that produced translations such as "Confucius" and "Mencius". These names are very easy for non-Chinese speakers to pronounce. I've read that these came from very early romanization work by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese#Missionary_systems" rel="nofollow">"various missionaries"</a>, but there's very little information about them. If anyone knows of good resources or books, that would be great.</p>

<p>In my case, I'm mainly interested in Mandarin romanizations that sound "familiar" and are easy to pronounce by English speakers, which sometimes means sacrificing consistency, accuracy or precision. For this purpose, I don't like Pinyin because some letters are pronounced much differently than in English, nor do I like Wade-Giles because it uses diacritics which are very foreign to English speakers.</p>

CC BY-SA 3.0
2013-05-08T07:52:01.443Z
There's not much on the *Latin* transcription system because most of the information that may have been published about it was lost.
dda
<romanization>
Missionary Romanization?
# Missionary Romanization?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2013-05-08)

I'm interested in the romanization system, or similar systems to, the one that produced translations such as "Confucius" and "Mencius". These names are very easy for non-Chinese speakers to pronounce. I've read that these came from very early romanization work by ["various missionaries"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese#Missionary_systems), but there's very little information about them. If anyone knows of good resources or books, that would be great.

In my case, I'm mainly interested in Mandarin romanizations that sound "familiar" and are easy to pronounce by English speakers, which sometimes means sacrificing consistency, accuracy or precision. For this purpose, I don't like Pinyin because some letters are pronounced much differently than in English, nor do I like Wade-Giles because it uses diacritics which are very foreign to English speakers.

**Tags:** romanization

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: There's not much on the *Latin* transcription system because most of the information that may have been published about it was lost.  

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## 1 answers

### Answer by username_2 on 2013-05-08. Score: 1

Confucius is a latin transliteration as opposed to an English one. Etymology might be a good starting point: <http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Confucius>

This article is probably highly relevant: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesuit_China_missions>

Further reading: [http://www.amazon.com/WINDOWS-INTO-CHINA-JESUITS-1580-1730/dp/B000ID3EIE](http://rads.stackoverflow.com/amzn/click/B000ID3EIE)


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