>I'm still wondering, though, how Feng Shui for example is transliterated as such when I'm given to understand it's pronounced more like "Fung Shway."<
Anna, you're right about the pronunciation, and put like that, I have no idea! Just the way they set up the rules in first place, I guess.
Hung, tongue...
Why not feng?
English spelling and pronunciation are far from a one-to-one match. The blessing of both the common transcriptions (transliterations? I don't know any more!) from Chinese is that once you know how to pronounce a combination of letters, you know how to pronounce it. It's consistent.
English speakers, on the other hand, live with such terrors as the [though, through, thought, bough, cough, enough] group of words, then complain that languages such as Chinese are too hard because 'you can't tell how to pronounce them.'
