The six Chinese plosives are generally rendered by English p t k, for instance, simple t in moutan, and Tanka, and aspirated t' in fantan and twankay (Yuan 1981: 251). In English, aspiration is allophonic, meaning multiple alternative pronunciations for a single phoneme in a particular language.
Thus, the Chinese unaspirated phoneme in dào 道 /taʊ/ is nearer to the pronunciation of English voiced unaspirated in Dow /daʊ/ than the voiceless aspirated in Taos [taʊs], but it is neither (Carr 1990: 60). ==Romanizations== Scholars have been developing Chinese romanization systems for four centuries, and the unaspirated 道 "road; way" has many transcriptions. Jesuit missionaries in China recorded the earliest romanizations of /taʊ/ 道.
In English and other languages, "d" and "t" indicate a voiced and unvoiced distinction, which is not phonemic in Chinese (Carr 1990: 59). While many scholars prefer the more familiar spelling "Taoism", arguing that it is now an English word in its own right, the term "Daoism" is becoming increasingly popular.
English-speakers treat them as the same sound, but they are phonetically different, the first is aspirated and the second is unaspirated. Phonological rules can miss the point when it comes to loanwords, which are borrowings that move from a language with one set of well-formedness conditions to a language with a different set, with the result that adjustments have to be made to meet the new constraints (Yip 1993:262).
Having explained that both "Daoism" and "Taoism" are pronounced "with a 'd' sound", i.e., /ˈdaʊ.ɪzəm/, Komjathy describes a new religious movement labeled "American Taoism" or "Popular Western Taoism" (a term coined by Herman 1998) in which "Taoism" is pronounced with a "hard 't' sound", /ˈtaʊ.ɪzəm/ (2014: 1, 206). ==Borrowings== Within the lexical set of English words originating from Chinese, the loanword Tao/Dao is more typical than the loanblend Taoism/Daoism.
The first bilingual Chinese dictionary in a Western language, Michele Ruggieri's and Matteo Ricci's Portuguese 1583-1588 Dicionário Português-Chinês or Pú-Hàn cídiǎn 葡漢辭典 (Yong and Peng 2008: 385), transcribed /taʊ/ as "táo" (Witek 2001: 190).
In one work, "Daoism" was preferred to "Taoism" principally for technical, phonological and conventional reasons, but also because it was thought the modern term "Daoism" helped highlight a departure from earlier Western interpretations of the philosophy (Girardot, Miller, and Liu 2001: xxxi).
The first bilingual Chinese dictionary in a Western language, Michele Ruggieri's and Matteo Ricci's Portuguese 1583-1588 Dicionário Português-Chinês or Pú-Hàn cídiǎn 葡漢辭典 (Yong and Peng 2008: 385), transcribed /taʊ/ as "táo" (Witek 2001: 190).
Miller later added that "Daoism" is his preferred usage as a distinction "from what 'Taoism' represented in the 20th-century Western imagination" (Miller 2008: xiii).
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