Peking > Beijing

[mightyWBA]

In my long ago youth,I was told the capital of China was Peking.However,now it is always referred to as Beijing. Who made the decision to change,when ,and why?

[jno]

the Chinese, about 1980. The name hasn't actually changed, it's just that they reckoned it sounded more like bayjing and the west was spelling it wrong; so the transliteration system was changed. Long ago it used to be Peiping, as I recall, but that was changed for the same reason. In Chinese spelling it's been the same name all along; the problem is English-alphabet ways of approximating the Chinese sound.

[Peter Pedant]

Cantonese - Peking

Mandarin bei-jing

(which I think is mandarin for Northern Capital)

When the Brits went to Peking in the 1860s, the Imperial Celestial servants spoke a language, and my forebears said brightly, oh this must be Mandarin the language of the rulers. In fact everyone in Peking - or Bei jing - spoke it. The Mandarin for Mandarin is putonghua, pu-tong - hua which means commmon tongue. But the Peking people kinda like calling it mandarin.

Now, MUCH more interestingly, who decides what characters are used for European cities ? I couldnt get a chinese t shirt printed in San Francisco (the first character for which is 3 which is san in Mandarin) with Manchester in the title as no-one knew what the characters were - and they said there is no point in us guessing, there will be correct characters and we will get it wrong. - But who had decided ?

and the answer is....apparently it sort of grows up and is decided by use and tacit agreement.

Oh, the transliteration ? Pin yin

and as above, the chinese govt just said, 1980, we are gonna use pin yin from now on. The Empress tzu-hsi (which I think is wade-giles but I am not sure) became overnight Ci-xi.

tzu hsi sounds more like suzie

and ci-xi sounds more like sir-shee

but you know, what the hell......

[Pinotage]

Its interesting how we (the UK) rushed to change our usage from Peking to Beijing yet we still call Napoli 'Naples', Roma 'Rome' and many other misspellings of European cities.

[jno]

Pinotage, those aren't really misspellings, they're the English names of foreign towns, just as Londra is the Italian name for London. They're pronounced as well as spelt differently; different words for the same thing, really, just like maison for house.

Marseilles and Lyons are trickier - same name, same pronunciation, but English speakers often spell them with an -s on the end, which the French don't. The trend in newspapers these days is to spell them the French way.

When whole names change, English usage usually changes too, though not always. Bombay is now Mumbai and Calcutta is Kolkata. But the change from Burma to Myanmar is seen as a political act by a dictatorship and many English-speakers refuse to go along with it. The same when Cambodia changed to Kampuchea; eventually, it changed back again.

[Aschenbach]

jno Pei-ching is the old Wade Giles romanization which preceded pinyin.

Peter Pedant Peking is not a Cantonese pronounciation. It's pronounced Baak-ging in Cantonese.

Conversely, Hong Kong is of Cantonese origin (actually Heung-gong) whereas in Mandarin it's xiang-gang.

What I want to know is why some journalists inexplicably pronounce it as Bei-zhing when it should be said as it's written?

[Chapel]

"...every girl in Constantinople

Lives in Istanbul, not Contantinople,

So if you've a date in Constantinople

She'll be waiting in Istanbul" - They Might Be Giants, Constantinople, 1990.