[ywl]

Originally posted by Maximillian:
Tien Chi is a Chinese word meaning literally "Heaven and Earth", or figuratively meaning the whole Universe.

I'm guessing the IW devs added the guttoral stop(') to make the words look (and sound?) more "different", but in actual romanized Chinese it's simply written "Tien Chi", with some added lines to specify the intonation.

The pronounciation for "Tien" is something like "Tea + Ann", spoken continuously (somewhat like how "Sigh + Ann" becomes "Cyan"). "Chi" is pronounced as "Chee" (as you pronounce "cheek").

Depends... There is more than one way to romanize Chinese characters. Tien Chi is definitely not Pin Yin, the official method for the mainland China.

I'm Chinese and I have absolutely no idea what Tien Chi means .

Tien does sound likes sky or heaven but the right PinYin for that should be Tian. Chi sound like many things but earth... The closest thing I can think of that sounds like Tien Chi is something like the Lake (or Pond) of Heaven. Or the Dynasty of Heaven - if you pronounce Chi in a funny way...

I guess we'll need the developer of Dominions to tell us where they get the words from.

The names in the game are mostly historical figure in Pin Yin. I have the suspicion that they lifted the names directly from the game "Romance of the Three Kingdom". Non-Chinese might not feel it but it actually feels weird for me to have a general called Lui-Bei under you - imaging having one of your knights called King Arthur...

The three immortals are three of the eight mythical figures in legends, or more exactly fairy tales. The pronounciation there is not Pin Yin though.

So, you see how confused I am when I'm looking at all these different names.

[ March 11, 2004, 21:21: Message edited by: ywl ]