![]() To hear a fluent speaker like my son rattle it off is awe inspiring. I believe that the primary effort in devising the NATO alphabet was to be sure the words could not be confused with others. What about cinnemon or cinema or city? Circus?Īpple, ball, cat, dog, egg, fire, goat, house, ice-cream, jam, kite, lion, moon, nose, owl, puppy, queen, red, sun, television, umbrella, vegetable, window, x-ray, yellow, zooĭoes anyone in the U.S. In the children's song it's pronounced as *cee* after all and the word is often written Xmas. *Christmas* for the third letter of the alphabet surprises me, but then again I'm not American. I have deliberately not added Chinese characters in this comment to stress the orality of the interactions.) As the lower part of this character has been 'simplified' in the PRC by substituting another less common character for 'sunset' (XI), the older formula is not understood by younger people in mainland China, and I cannot substitute XI for WEI in the old formula and be understood, so I have to switch to some other circumlocution, such as "Luo-si-fu de LUO", the LUO in the surname Roosevelt, assuming that my listener knows who Roosevelt was :-) In Taiwan and Hong Kong, it can still be communicated using the traditional formula "Si-wei-LUO", the LUO 'four'. (An additional 'wrinkle' arises when the form of the written character has been 'simplified' in the PRC, making some of the formulas no longer workable, e.g., my own Chinese surname LUO. There are some commonly used examples in these formulas, especially in the case of surnames, but in the case of other morphemes, as in English there is often variation in the example words chosen by the explainer. er-dong CHEN, and 'east' ) or referring to a common (usually) two syllable compound word in which the morpheme/character in question occurs: e.g.ZHIDAO de ZHI the ZHI in the word ZHIDAO, 'to know'. Aside from 'writing in air' with one's finger, there are a few commonly used oral formulas (e.g. over the telephone, or -sometimes- even in person, when a paper and pencil is not readily available.
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