Why are there such wildly different transliterations of the name? Usually those come from westerners messing up consonant clusters or vowels in a weird way (or choosing weird orthographies for consonants not directly covered by Latin characters), but there the consonants are changing whether they're voiced, where they're articulated, and even what sort of consonant they are altogether while the vowels stay the same. Is it a matter of dialect or a Cantonese vs Mandarin thing?
Beiping means "northern pacification," and Beijing means "northern capital." The first Ming emperor named it Beiping; it had been Dadu under the Mongols.
Peking is just Beijing in the pre-pinyin transliteration. Same way Nanking became Nanjing.
A mixture of everything. Written Chinese is legible to anyone who can read Chinese, regardless of the dialect. The spoken versions are not always mutually intelligible. When Europeans started transliterating Chinese words, they did so according to their own languages' pronunciation rules, so there were rival French and English transliterations, for example. Meanwhile, the early European contact with the Chinese came from the southern coast, rather than the northern capital. The word Mandarin, amusingly enough, comes from the Portuguese by way of (maybe?) an Indian language, and Portugal dealt mostly with the places that speak Cantonese today.
(I'm currently reading John Keay's China: A History, which has helped a great deal in understanding some of this, as well as much else. It's reflexively anti-Communist but when I reach that era I intend to supplement it with other and more specialized books. For ancient and medieval history it's been very, very good.)
Some other sources:
A new book on Chinese orthography: https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-the-typewriter-changed-chinese
Edit - As for sound changes, I don't know the specifics but I do know that they've been considerable. Older Chinese poetry has been especially valuable here because the rhymes then are different from the rhymes of today.
I did try figuring this out in earnest, and it felt like a waste of time for a shitpost lol. Clearly foreigners hear shit differently plus politics. Like I read that the original "Peking" transliteration was introduced into the Romance languages by the French 400 years ago. And also that the North China pronounces it "Beijing" while in the South you can still hear "Peking." Also that in Mandarin it sounds in-between of those two anyway. Conclusion: we just gotta say Bei-Xi-ng and be done with it imo.
Why are there such wildly different transliterations of the name? Usually those come from westerners messing up consonant clusters or vowels in a weird way (or choosing weird orthographies for consonants not directly covered by Latin characters), but there the consonants are changing whether they're voiced, where they're articulated, and even what sort of consonant they are altogether while the vowels stay the same. Is it a matter of dialect or a Cantonese vs Mandarin thing?
Beiping means "northern pacification," and Beijing means "northern capital." The first Ming emperor named it Beiping; it had been Dadu under the Mongols.
Peking is just Beijing in the pre-pinyin transliteration. Same way Nanking became Nanjing.
Thanks.
As a follow up question, is that based on historical dialects or sound changes, or just the original transliteration being inaccurate?
A mixture of everything. Written Chinese is legible to anyone who can read Chinese, regardless of the dialect. The spoken versions are not always mutually intelligible. When Europeans started transliterating Chinese words, they did so according to their own languages' pronunciation rules, so there were rival French and English transliterations, for example. Meanwhile, the early European contact with the Chinese came from the southern coast, rather than the northern capital. The word Mandarin, amusingly enough, comes from the Portuguese by way of (maybe?) an Indian language, and Portugal dealt mostly with the places that speak Cantonese today.
(I'm currently reading John Keay's China: A History, which has helped a great deal in understanding some of this, as well as much else. It's reflexively anti-Communist but when I reach that era I intend to supplement it with other and more specialized books. For ancient and medieval history it's been very, very good.)
Some other sources:
A new book on Chinese orthography: https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-the-typewriter-changed-chinese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin#Background:_romanization_of_Chinese_before_1949
Edit - As for sound changes, I don't know the specifics but I do know that they've been considerable. Older Chinese poetry has been especially valuable here because the rhymes then are different from the rhymes of today.
GOOD post. this guy 学's
Cool, thanks. Linguistics is such an interesting subject and something I regret not studying more of since college.
I did try figuring this out in earnest, and it felt like a waste of time for a shitpost lol. Clearly foreigners hear shit differently plus politics. Like I read that the original "Peking" transliteration was introduced into the Romance languages by the French 400 years ago. And also that the North China pronounces it "Beijing" while in the South you can still hear "Peking." Also that in Mandarin it sounds in-between of those two anyway. Conclusion: we just gotta say Bei-Xi-ng and be done with it imo.
I was told it was a Hokkien/Mandarin thing by a linguist one time