FlyerTalk Forums - View Single Post - Place names that are very different in other languages

Nov 10, 2009 | 5:16 am

#61

Michael

Join Date: Sep 2003

Location: Currently living in MAD

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Posts: 924

Quote:

Originally Posted by ksandness

"Peking" and "Beijing" simply come from different Chinese dialects. The latter is the standard Mandarin pronunciation.

Are you sure about that?

I'm pretty sure that both spellings are transliterations of the same pronunciation in Mandarin. "Peking" was the transliteration using the old Wade-Giles system, while "Beijing" is the transliteration using the newer Pinyin system that was introduced by the PRC government in the 1950s or so. Both should be pronounced the same way -- which is admittedly counterintuitive for those who don't know how the systems work.

(Same goes for the switch for other place names: Nanking -> Nanjing, Tsingtao -> Qingdao, etc. And if you wanted to write the standard English pronunciation of Peking in Wade-Giles, I think it would be something like "P'ek'ing"...)

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