Could someone explain the logic behind Confucius’ English naming?
Lao Zi -> Lao Tzu
Sun Zi -> Sun Tzu
Kong Zi -> Confucius
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it’s just the way they decided to latinize 孔夫子 , which he was called. it means “master Kong.”
Marco Polo heard people calling him Kong Zi or Kongfuzi and wrote what he heard in latin: Confucius. There are actually several words that are actually “mishearings” of other language words (“dutch” is a mishearing of “deutsch” for example)
There was also Meng Zi – who got translated into Mencius. (they were likely not speaking modern Beijing mandarin in the 13th century).
We probably don’t even know what language/dialect was spoken at the time and place when these scholars were alive (some more than a thousand years earlier). It likely will not resemble any of the modern dialects in China.
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that’s because Confucius is his Latinised name. The other two also have Latinised name: Laocius and Suncius respectively.
So why is Confucius stuck with his Latinised name? well maybe it just simply rings better to English speaker.
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I thought it’s because it’s latinized from *Kǒng Fūzǐ* (孔夫子, “Master Kong”)
Kong Fuzi and Confucius isn’t that far off..
It has to due with those early transliterations/romanizations (attempting to write words from other languages with our Latin alphabet) being firmly cemented in the West over centuries.The new Pinyin romanization system for Chinese is just that, new; created and adopted in its current modern form under the People’s Republic of China after the Communists won the civil war against the Nationalist Goumindang (old transliteration Koumintang). Even the Chinese were using one of the old styles of Chinese romanization (Wade-Giles) for texts they translated into English for decades, e.g. using Mao Tse-Tung in favour of Mao Zedong.
These early romanizations are so entrenched in Western culture it would take some effort to change it. For example, in the Romance languages, like Spanish and French, they still call the Chinese capital Beijing Peking. Peking being an old transliteration of Beijing. Some of the new Pinyin romanizations might make their way to being the default spellings in the future. I’ve been seeing this phenomenon more recently in the case of the more accurate Chinggis Khan being used instead of the old Ghengis Khan.
Why are they all called Zi?
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