You're viewing a single thread.
Not so fun fact (because it's obnoxious): Peking and Beijing are pronounced the same. Beijing.
Peking is pronounced like its written bc its not mandarin beijing for northern capital but cantonese for northern capital.
The world used cantonese before mandarin for few reasons and depending on words. Cantonese was a much larger community overseas so they taught foreigners cantonese words. The other reason for some words is that cantonese is closer to the ancient chinese than mandarin, so some words when they are far back transferred to the west and middle east sound closer to cantonese
While all that is true, it leaves out the history of transcribing Chinese into English. Until pinyin was introduced in the '70s, Mandarin transcriptions also used the "pe" transcription.
Thats bc of cantonese not bc english randomly made mandarin sound like cantonese.
Cantonese and mandarin are so different in pronunciation and word usage you know when an english word is made to resemble a cantonese or a mandarin word.
Peking is so obviously not mandarin its not even close. Pe was never pronounced Bei. People just knew Peking was supposed to be Beijing in mandarin so some mandarin people skipped the middle man and just used their own language word despite something else being written on the paper
I'm not sure why you're going on as though I said English made Mandarin sound like anything. You're kind of going off on a tangent. And you can literally read up on this topic of how transcription has changed over the years.
I as many of my people know cantonese and mandarin while knowing latin and english, we have way more insight than your 2nd hand story which might not even be the fault of your friend if he only had few minutes to tell you about it or you simply not having the time to understand him.
It is important to not let this just go bc people blindly believe things on reddit and lemmy especially when it is such foreign topic. Peking was Peking bc it is cantonese transferred english, german and co. Thats a known fact
You're starting to come across as racist.
Again, you can read about the history of Chinese to English transcription. Nothing I have said is inaccurate.
Pulling out the racist card on language topics and being confronted on "I heard from a friend" is hilarious. I think at this point people can just read that your comments are wrong and are no longer easily fooled by misinformation, so it is fine now. I dont need you to admit being wrong. Which barely happens on reddit nor lemmy
Funny coming from the person who refuses to look up the history of transcription. Glad to be done with this conversation, however.
That is an interesting rabbit hole. I'm reading the correct pronunciation is more like "pay-cheeng" (even if not the official spelling)?
Should the "B" be as hard as we normally pronounce it in America?
My Chinese friends always pronounced it like an English 'B'. It might be regional.
It is likely you are confused by the hen and egg problem of why your friend said Beijing when reading Peking. He simply skipped and ignored what was written bc he knew it was the equivalent of his own languages main capital city so he just used mandarin word for it.
I'm talking about in conversation.
It is supposed to be pronounced with soft B. Hard P is from Peking which is cantonese. The rest of the world adopted Peking first before Beijing bc cantonese was the language of most chinese emigrants decades and century ago