[GZG] ESU ships names (Chinese side)

Technically, there is no "Chinese People's Navy". Land, sea and air forces of
the People's Republic of China (PRC) are all branches of the unified
Zhōngguó Rénmín Jiěfà ng Jūn (Literally, Chinese People's Liberation
Army, but usually rendered in English as just People's Liberation Army or
PLA). The naval branch is the Zhōngguó Rénmín Jiěfà ngjūn Hǎijūn
(usually rendered in English as
People's Liberation Army Navy or PLAN). The air-force similarly is
the Zhōngguó Rénmín Jiěfà ngjūn Kōngjūn, or People's
Liberation Army Air-force (PLAAF). Literally speaking, hǎijūn
translates as sea-army or sea-military, and kōngjūn as air-army or
air-military, so a more natural translation *would* be Chinese
People's Liberation Navy and Airforce respectively. I suppose the word "army"
is inserted in the conventional English name to emphasise the unified command
structure, but that's just a guess. It would be quite reasonable for the ESU
to call its armed forces the People's
Liberation <force-name> in whatever languages it uses.

Tibet is not a Chinese word (or a Tibetan one) so I don't think it's likely
that the ESU would include it in a ship name. The Chinese name for the region
called Tibet in English is Xīzà ng (I phrased that carefully, no flames
please).

Chou En-Lai (nowadays usually Romanised as Zhou Enlai) would indeed
be a good name for a warship. Not only a successful revolutionary and military
commander, but subsequently Premier and Foreign Minister of the People's
Republic.

There is a good resource here: http://www.jiawen.net/
Chinesenames.html on Mandarin Names For Gamers. By the way, when I use the
term "Chinese" to refer to language, or give romanised forms of "Chinese"
words, I'm referring only to Standard Mandarin. I'm assuming that will be the
official language of the Chinese parts of the ESU as it is that of the PRC
today.

Best regards, Robert Bryett

> On 05/04/2008, at 19:18 , Тимофей Потапенко wrote:

> But Chinese People's Navy was started by Soviet spesialists in

Well, that might be one of the reasons why Russian tradition and Russian part
finally prevailed in ESU Navy. If Chinese person from the South would have
problems to understand Chinese person from a central province (unless they
learned at school Mandarin Dialect, wihch is not native for both of them),
Russian from Ukrain wouldn't notice any differences in the speach of Russian
from, let's say, Kamchatka. Even more: Russian, Belorussian, Ukranian, Chekh,
Slovak, Serb, Croat, Slovenian, Polish, Bulgarian can understand each other,
even if they haven't learned any other language, besides there own. From that
point of view Russian is more convenient for the Navy.

About Chinese-language ships names. Well, I haven't seen yet any. Than,
I would suggest Russian-Soviet scheme, but using native Chinese words.
And Russian Scheme allows to give names to the ships after national
territories, using their national languages (there were DD and CL with
Ukranian langnguage names, and at least one submarin (Lembitu) with Estonian
language name). So, "Hun X'zang" for "Red Tibet" or "Renmin X'xang" for
"people's Tibet" would be nice.

> Technically, there is no "Chinese People's Navy". Land, sea and air

> the unified command structure, but that's just a guess. It would be

> for the region called Tibet in English is X?zàng (I phrased that

> military commander, but subsequently Premier and Foreign Minister of

> > to that time), and, as far as I know, they follow Soviet-stalinist

> > words. E g: "Hun Tibet" (Red Tibet), "T'hen Hong Kong" (Communist

> > of there Civil War, so, it's a good name for "Voroshilov"-class