Doesn't mean anything - the chinese probably heard westerners pronounce "tank" and tried to emulate its sound. It was, however, not possible to replicate the original sound due to differences in phonetics - therefore we end up with a weird-sounding name that remotely resembles the original. Likewise, "Sun Tze" isn't Sun Tze pronounced using English phonetics - that would sound like unintelligble gibberish if you tried telling that to the man himself. A more accurate (albeit ugly) way to pronounce that name would have been "Swoon Zhi". BTW there exists a system known as "Hanyu Pinyin" that uses Latin alphabets to render chinese phonetics since the characters themselves don't really tell you how to pronounce the word.
It would be handy if all Chinese words renered into Latin characters had been done phonetically - at the Uni where I work we have many Chinese staff and many more Chinese students. My attempts at pronunciation cause great hilarity. For example, Jie Zhang is pronounced Shie Cheeeong.
That's interesting. It's obvious once again that Magyar has no relation whatsoever to any other European language.
post subject I have never heard a British tank refered to as a "Panzer" by british tank forces, a "grunt Crusher" yes,but Panzer, no. We were not very hot on "Grammatik" either, a mixture of German, Arabic, Hindi,Italian, army slang, but not "Hochdeutsch". It was quite surprising how quickly people understood when there was a few tons of Comet outside the back-door! Must go, got to be in Deutschland tomorrow night!
:lol: Sorry, but in Spain is "Carro de Combate", although civilians go for the easy and short "tanque". That's maybe a mexican variant.
Thats not totally true, we just call it ''zwaar pantervoertuig'' (heavy armored vehicle) or ''zwaar gevechtsvoertuig'' (heavy (armored) fighting vehicle) if we don't call them tanks