Re: Pronunciation for Diaoyu Islands - Revisited
Hello PHenry1026,
I’m just a learner and I know little about Chinese language, but according to my Chinese-Japanese dictionary, “Diaoyu” seems to be pronounced as /diào yú/ in Pinyin and, I believe, [tiɑʊ y] (sorry, I’m ignoring the tone diacritics) in IPA (by the way, Chinese /t/ and /d/ are realized as aspirated [tʰ] and unaspirated [t] respectively).
It must be quite tricky for native English speakers to pronounce [tiɑʊ y] correctly, because in English, /t/ is aspirated like [tʰ] in stressed syllable-initial position, and there is no triphthong [iɑʊ] or high front rounded vowel [y] ( with lip-rounding) in English phonemes.
So I don’t think there is a “correct” pronunciation of “Diaoyu” in English in the first place.
I’ve heard a CNN reporter say [daʊ ju] and a narrator of the audio version of The Economist say [di aʊ ju], but both of them are far from [tiɑʊ y].