On Fri, 4 Apr 2003, Vincent Penquerc'h wrote:
> > And of course, "Beijing" is no harder to say that "Peking",
Actually it is, there are -four- ways to say 'Beijing' and only two ways
to say Peking. It hinges on the hard or softness of the 'j' in Beijing
and the first 'e' in both words (which is where the extra 'i' in Beijing
came from). Is it a 'j' or a 'g' sound? The native pronunciation of
Beijing for example is a hard j sound like in 'jewel'. Most westerners
pronounce it with a soft j.
> About that bit, I remember, some years ago (or maybe even tens of
> years, I seem to tend to remember various stuff happening later
> than they actually did), the official transcription of chinese has
> been changed, leading to some name changes.
Peiping had nothing to do with transliteration but a change in regime.
> However, a Google search yields nothing, so this may be just my
> imagination going a bit too overboard ??
Wade-Giles was replaced by Pinyin. The entire Peking/Beijing pronunciation
is people reading the original transliteration (e.g. j in a -lot- of
transliteration systems means both a 'j' sound and a 'y' sound, Russki is
a good example of the 'y' sound usage) using their native pronunciation
instead of the correct transliteration sounds. The same sort of thing has
happened several times with the ideograms as well. Over the last few
decades the Chinese have made a concerted effort to 'modernize' their
language with respect to both transliteration (ala Pinyin) and ideograms
(ala 'Modern Chinese'). It's reached a point where many native (and well
versed foreign) Chinese can read one or the other but not both fluently.
Taiwan and the PRC have also developed different ideograms for the same
meaning, and the same ideogram for different meanings. The Chinese
language has been and continues to be going through a major transformation
(another historic one is the move from a focus on single ideograms to
using two ideograms as the standard).
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