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I have been contacted by the great and noble Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, its sequels, prequels, and parralex novels, the Tales of Alvin Maker series, and the Homecoming series in addition to many other great novels. I’m totally psyched! The dude actually emailed me personally to answer a question!

Unfortunately, the context of my question is lost (I didn’t save it anywhere, and the email he sent did not contain it). However, it was something to the effect of:

Q: What is the correct pronunciation of Han Tzu? In Ender’s Game and the Shadow series, the nickname “Hot Soup” suggests that it would be “Hon Zoo”. But in your short story, Cheater, you point out that it is pronounced “Ze”.

A: The answer is embarrassingly simple. When I first created the character of Hot Soup, I had no idea how Romanized Chinese words should be pronounced. I assumed Han Tzu would be pronounced as written. Then the Chinese government rationalized the romanized writing system to conform with actual pronunciation today (the old system was invented by Jesuits, I understand, and so long ago that it does not reflect changes in pronunciation since that time). Now Han Tzu’s name is written Han Ze. Bummer, huh?

So I had to have the family deliberately use the OLD spelling of the name, and then the kids in battle school, seeing the name WRITTEN, would make the joke; and the joke name would continue despite Han Tzu’s attempts to explain the correct pronunciation. In other words, I made the other kids as ignorant as I was when writing the book [grin]*.

*Originally the word grin was in greater-than and less-than characters, not brackets. However, Wordpress is for whatever reason not allowing me to use greater-than and less-than. You would have thought that would be a glitch they could have remedied.

I can’t believe he emailed me. I have OSC’s personal email address!!! Wow! (I won’t give it away or sell it by the way, sorry guys.) Heh