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<blockquote data-quote="wuyanei" data-source="post: 2665506" data-attributes="member: 28913">Wu shi (wu1 shi2, or 'wuu shee'): &quot;Of those who can see (commune with) ghosts (spirits of the ancestors), the women are called wu and the men are called shi.&quot;However, as you can see, the right part of the character for 'shi' looks a lot like the character for 'see', which is pronounced 'jien'. According to usual chinese pronouncation rules, you often pronounce a word as the non-meaningful part of the character. In this case, left part denotes 'wu' -- the meaning of the character -- so a chinese person who does not actually recognize this (rather uncommon) word, if forced to guess its pronouncation, would likely pronounce it as 'jien'. This is similar to an native English-speaker miss-pronouncing the french name 'Lamer (La mer)' as 'lamer' -- you guessed wrong, because in this case the normal rules do not apply.My guess is that the designers asked a chinese friend to pronounce the word for them. The friend made a guess according to the usual character pronouncation rules, but in this special case he or she guessed wrong.I have sent you a private e-mail with a .jpg file of the characters wu and shi, since I do not know how to post images in the forum. If you could post the images here for everyone else -- or even better, teach me how to do so myself, I would be most grateful.Hope that helps! Bye bye!Edit: Of course! *Slaps forehead* I forgot that I could just add it as an attachment. File added.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="wuyanei, post: 2665506, member: 28913"] Wu shi (wu1 shi2, or 'wuu shee'): "Of those who can see (commune with) ghosts (spirits of the ancestors), the women are called wu and the men are called shi." However, as you can see, the right part of the character for 'shi' looks a lot like the character for 'see', which is pronounced 'jien'. According to usual chinese pronouncation rules, you often pronounce a word as the non-meaningful part of the character. In this case, left part denotes 'wu' -- the meaning of the character -- so a chinese person who does not actually recognize this (rather uncommon) word, if forced to guess its pronouncation, would likely pronounce it as 'jien'. This is similar to an native English-speaker miss-pronouncing the french name 'Lamer (La mer)' as 'lamer' -- you guessed wrong, because in this case the normal rules do not apply. My guess is that the designers asked a chinese friend to pronounce the word for them. The friend made a guess according to the usual character pronouncation rules, but in this special case he or she guessed wrong. I have sent you a private e-mail with a .jpg file of the characters wu and shi, since I do not know how to post images in the forum. If you could post the images here for everyone else -- or even better, teach me how to do so myself, I would be most grateful. Hope that helps! Bye bye! Edit: Of course! *Slaps forehead* I forgot that I could just add it as an attachment. File added. [/QUOTE]

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