The purpose of this lemma is to summarize some general principles for transcribing foreign names into Chinese characters, in particular, Standard Chinese (SC). It is not controversial that the Chinese language has long been noted for its resistance to “phonetic borrowings” from foreign languages (Amelung et al. 2001; Norman 1988; Novotná 1967; Wiebusch and Tadmor 2009, among others; see also The World Loanword Datab…