Fung Shway – Feng Shui

shwing fweyReferences :

Write (pronounced rayt) . . . why not write it as rayt in the first place?References :

Funny you should ask. We were talking about this only yesterday. We decided it’s because the feng shui people need to know who’s in the know and who the newbies are.References :

Because it’s not an English word.References :

You are part of the fenetic generation who does not know how to spell!

Fenetic is spelling words as they sound according to your accent instead of using the root words from Latin, Greek and French.References :

Maybe because it’s not english DA and it would mean something different if it were spelled that way.References :

Feng Shui is spelled in "Han Yu Pin Ying" meaning chinese characters in english term:
"F" – fur
"eng" – earn
"Feng" – fur earn
‘sh" – sh (as in "ssshh")
"ui" – way
"shui" shway

Does it bother you? Please learn "Han Yu Pin Ying"…..References :

it mite hav sumthing to dew with tha fakt that it is japaneez or chyneez, nut inglish…..most inglish werdz are spelld difrentlee then wut sum peepl think thay shud bee. perhaps yew shuld start yer own dikshunary.References :

Because it’s Chinese of course! What a crazy question…!

Frankly, ‘fung shway’ is probably not the best way to demonstrate the pronunciation anyway, and if you tried mentioning the subject to a native speaker of Chinese they probably wouldn’t understand your ‘accent’!
; )References :

Yu kan go uh-hed an rite it "fung shway" if yu wunt, but peepl will think yur stoopid.References :

fengshui is the pronunciation or pinyin used by china (people’s republic of), instead of the old pinyin which taiwan still used. china used the alphabets to adapt the pinyin to make it easy for western people to study the language.

on the other hand, why not spell it that way? i mean, it is like asking why does "rendezvous" not spelled as "randayvoo". i believe that your question is stupid to start with.References :

Feng Shui is the chinese pinyin.
Pinyin is the romanisation of chinese charcters and is also how they enter their characters in to a computer.References : Lived in China

Feng Shui is a Chinese word. It is actually written with the character for wind (feng) and for water (shui). However, China has adapted what is called pinyin or romanization – a way to use Latin based letters to spell out the sound of the character. It is used all over in Mainland China, while Taiwan still uses phonetic characters (bo po mo fo or zhuyin).References :

I’m not sure why so many people felt like insulting you on this one. I thought it was an interesting question and not at all the same as why "rendez-vous" is not spelt "rendayvoo".

Maybe it’s bad luck to spell fung shway.References :

The pronunciation "fung shway" is actually an Anglicized version of a Chinese phrase. Chinese is usually written in Chinese characters, but there is an alphabet called pinyin which is often used to write Chinese with Roman characters. Since Chineses and English have different sounds, the pinyin system uses some letters to represent different sounds from ones that they usually represent in the English writing system. For example, the first vowel in "feng" is more like a schwa, but the letter "e" has been used because that’s the letter used in pinyin to represent that sound, as opposed to the "u" that the English writing system would use.

I could point out that any writing system is usually an approximation of the pronunciation of a language and often does not contain all the phonetic information about the language that it’s trying to represent. The English writing system is famous for having a lot of mismatch between the letters used to write a word and the sounds those letters are supposed to represent. For example, why do we write a word that sounds like "nayt" as "knight"?References : I’m a linguist.