Kung fu V.S. Gung fu ???

[ShotoSan]

So, I have only recently been able to study Wing Chun 'Kung Fu" but I have seen some other spellings of the word, and I am a little confused about it...

 

[Dragon Fist]

So, I have only recently been able to study Wing Chun 'Kung Fu" but I have seen some other spellings of the word, and I am a little confused about it...

This is yet another result of western linguists confusing both eastern and western speakers. In the once near-universal Wade-Giles spelling, a Chinese "G" sound was written in English as "K", while what the Chinese pronounced as "K" was transcribed as "K' ". Thus if kung fu were supposed to be pronounced with a "k" sound, it would have been written as "k'ung fu." When Bruce Lee introduced American audiences to his martial arts, he both spoke and wrote the American "G", hence "gung fu." Confused? Don't worry about it, so is everyone else.

I read this from this website:
http://www.shaolin.com/page.asp?content_id=1004

 

[ShotoSan]

So Kung fu = Gung Fu??

 

[Jade Tigress]

So Kung fu = Gung Fu??

Yes.

 

[Dragon Fist]

Yes,

just like potato, potata

 

[7starmantis]

or potatoe

 

[Patrick Skerry]

Kung fu = pronounced in Mandarin (Northern China)

Gung fu = pronounced in Cantonese (Southern China)


Get yourselves a copy of the 1968 Black Belt Magazine Yearbook and in it Bruce Lee explained very clearly that he was Cantonese so he pronounced it "Gung fu".

 

[Randy Strausbaugh]

Gong fu = pronounced in pinyin.

 

[Jade Tigress]

Gong fu = pronounced in pinyin.

Can you explain pinyin to me? I've been doing some online research on chinese characters and have come across that term but the information I have read on it is not very enlightening.

Also, can you recommend any good sites on learning chinese writing? I am interested in learning how to read it. I did learn that to translate an English word to Chinese writing you would need at least two (or more) Chinese characters to accurately capture the English word. However, I can't find any information on breaking down the characters into English or visa versa.

I'm very new at this subject so any info can give would be appreciated.


Thanks. :asian:

 

[RRouuselot]

Kung fu = pronounced in Mandarin (Northern China)

Gung fu = pronounced in Cantonese (Southern China)

Actually that has little to do with it.
The only real difference between using “K” or “G” is the Romanization system.

There are 3 main pronunciation systems.

• Wade-Giles
• Pinyin
• Yale

The Wade-Giles system is really outdated and has some weird spellings. The Pinyin was developed by Chinese so there again you get some pretty whacked out spellings like Xing instead of Shing (Yale) and I think in Wade-Giles it’s something like Sying. There is another system invented by the Chinese that looks like Japanese kana. This is mainly used in Taiwan.

 

[Randy Strausbaugh]

Can you explain pinyin to me? I've been doing some online research on chinese characters and have come across that term but the information I have read on it is not very enlightening.

As I understand it, pinyin was developed by the Chinese government in order to more correctly convey the sounds of their language into written English. In most cases it seems to do the job, but how they get a "ch" sound out of the letter "q", I'll never know (ch'i in Wade-Giles = qi in pinyin). It seems to be used more and more in transliterating Chinese into English.

 

[Jade Tigress]

Thank You RRouuselot and Randy. Your explanations are a lot more clear than anything I've found online! Everything I read on it so far was composed of a bunch of words that filled a page yet didn't make any sense. (Much like a certain MT poster....)

Thanks again for your input. Any recommendations on websites with clear information? Everything I've looked at so far makes my eyes glaze over! LOL!