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Little linguistic point of distinction about Zheng Yi Sao's name.
Hi, great question, @odi-et-amo-star ! "Ching Shih" is also a title defining who she is by her relation to her husband. In modern Mandarin, expressed in Western script through the use of Hanyu pinyin romanization, this title would be rendered as "Zhèng Shì." This title gives the indicator she's of the Zheng clan, Zheng's wife or Zheng's widow. It's not her name, it's her title, just like "Zheng Yi Sao" is, in slightly different terms.
But I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself and not explaining as much as I need to, and I don't want to confuse folks, so let me explain a little about dialects and romanization styles. When I say that Sek Yeung's personal name would properly be rendered in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, I mean that the two are entirely different dialects. Cantonese and Mandarin are different dialects of the same language, Chinese. Modern Mandarin didn't exist in the time of Sek Yeung!
In modernity, people in Mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore typically speak and write in Mandarin, though usage varies regionally. People in Hong Kong and Guangdong Province speak and write in Cantonese. Sek Yeung, our Zheng Yi Sao or Ching Shih, is from Guangdong Province! So that's why Cantonese dialect usage matters here.
Mandarin use in mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters, which are easier to draw perhaps, but less expressive of meaning. Cantonese uses traditional Chinese characters. (Taiwanese Mandarin uses traditional characters, showing how these rules aren't absolute, for political and cultural reasons.) Cantonese uses the Jyutping romanization system, which shows the six tones of the language with numbers like with "sek6 joeng4," while Mandarin uses Hanyu pinyin romanization, which uses four tones.
The expression of her title as "Ching Shih" uses the Wade-Giles system of romanization, an older way of transcribing the characters of Chinese into the Latin alphabet which I mentioned in the original post. This system of romanization was used in late Qing-era China. The way we do this now in Mandarin is typically through Hanyu romanization-- a different and more modern system than the Wade-Giles method.
In the 1950s, mainland Chinese underwent dramatic language reforms to simplify and modernize language for the public sphere, producing contemporary Mandarin and standardizing the use of Hanyu pinyin, both as used in the show. And for Cantonese, Jyutping is a romanization system that was developed in 1993, so it's also considered quite modern as a way to write out the sounds of Cantonese dialect in Western script!
