Content-Type: text/shitpost

Vernor Vinge likes to use “Q” to represent the /t͡ʃ/ sound of English “church”, similar to how it is used in pinyin. But he does this even in places that Chinese does not. So for example, there is an organization in some of his novels called the Qeng Ho, pronounced “cheng ho”, and inspired by the historical Chinese mariner Cheng Ho. But Cheng Ho is not romanized with a “Q”; in Pinyin it is written “Zheng He”.

In the case of the Qeng Ho this is totally legit, because the Qeng Ho exist ten or twenty thousand years in our future, and Vinge can make up whatever language he wants for them. He does like to hint that the languages in those novels are descended from Earth languages, but in ten thousand years anything can change.

However! One of the main characters in his 1986 novel Marooned in Realtime is Marta Korolev, and her full name is given at one point as Marta Qih-hui Qen Korolev. I now wonder if Vinge was thinking of the extremely common name “Chen” (陳) when he named Marta Korolev “Qen”.

But “Chen” is not spelled with a Q in Pinyin. It is spelled “Chen”. Not only is there is no name “Qen”, but there cannot be because in in Mandarin “q” is never followed by “e”. And Korolev was born around the beginning of the 21st century, not 10,000 years from now.

Oh well. Maybe “Qen” is Albanian.