That’s something I’ve always wondered. Even allowing for the poor fit of English pronunciation to English spelling, ‘k’ and ‘j’ don’t represent similar sounds. What’s the original Chinese phoneme that can be rendered both ways?
Well, it’s always a risk when someone who knows nothing about a subject goes Googling, but. . .
http://www.chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?p=29497
It’s a thread on another board, and it briefly mentions some transliteration issues. Apparently, even within China the pronunciation/phoneme varies in different dialects.
Hopefully one of our own informed Chinese experts will come around later will supply more info.
As I understand it (as a person with interest in toponymy but not a speaker of Chinese), the middle letter in “Northern Capital” in non-dialectal Mandarin is a very clipped “ch” sound, almost a stop rather than a plosive, formed at the front of the palate and slightly voiced, and resembling an English J more than anything else. For that reason, Pinyin renders it with a J. Wade-Giles focused on the stop aspect and rendered it as a K, possibly influenced by a dialectal usage where it did have aspects of a /k/ sound. I may, however, be quite a bit out to lunch on this, and I await someone with expertise in Chinese phonemics and/or Chinese toponyms to correct my statements.
(BTW, the variant Peiping was what was used for the city when Nanking/Nanjing (which has the same mysterious phoneme and means “Southern Capital”) was the national capital, and the meaning is “Northern Peace.” It was presumably selected to preserve close sound similarity to Beijing. The P/B variant between Beijing/Peking is another case of “slightly voiced” – the sound is midway between the unvoiced English /p/ and the voiced /b/.
basically, wade giles was a system devised by linguists and had an apostrophe as an aspiration point. However, in general usuage (maps, newspapers, media) the aspiration point was dropped and ended up with Peiking, Nanking, etc.
The current pinyin romanization does not delineate aspiration points.
Wade Giles as I understand it, is used for cantonese, another is yale. In cantonese it is Bak king ( I can’t do the accents of this keyboard) . In mandrin ( I don’t speak mandrin) it is Bejing (or close). I think our Peiking is closer to cantonese, and Bejing is perfered because it is closer to mandrin.
This is the way Iv’e always understood it to be.
Spelling and grammer subject to change without notice.
I would dispute the claim that k and j aren’t similar sounds. The only difference between them is that the j sound begins with the tounge touching the roof of your mouth. Other than that they’re identical.
Student of Chinese checking in. I’m studying Mandarin but I have enough familiarity with transcription issues to discuss this. “Peking” is not Wade-Giles. The Wade-Giles version would be Pei3-Ching1. “Peking” is from the days when Chinese place names were not translated systematically (hence “Canton” which doesn’t sound much like “Guangdong” (which isn’t even the name of the city!) in any dialect) and I’m not sure if its origins are known, but it doesn’t come from Mandarin. (Both Pinyin and Wade-Giles are transcriptions of Mandarin, the “common language” of China; there are two different Yale romanizations, one for Mandarin and one for Cantonese.)
The Mandarin sound written “j” is not easily described in English but it’s closer to an English “j” than anything else. There was a shift at some point and the “k” initial changed, in certain phonological circumstances, to a “j” in Mandarin, while it remains a “k” sound in most of the other Chinese languages. “Peking” most likely comes from Cantonese or Shanghainese, since those cities had a great deal of contact with the West.
An interesting fact about that is that most Western place names were first rendered into Chinese by speakers of Cantonese or Shanghainese. Mandarin speakers simply read the characters used to transcribe the names, using the Mandarin pronunciations. So “Canada”, for instance, sounds pretty similar in Cantonese but the Mandarin equivalent is “Jianada”, since characters with an initial “k” sound in Cantonese often have a “j” sound in Mandarin. Same goes for the middle syllable in “Zhijiage”, the Mandarin transcription of “Chicago”.
So I don’t know the precise origin of the name, but “Peking” doesn’t sound right under any Mandarin romanization system. I’ve read that the Cantonese pronunciation of the name is “Pakking”, which is close enough to explain the origin of the name. But rest assured that “j” in Mandarin doesn’t sound a thing like “k”.
Excalibre, is my description of the “J” sound in the first paragraph of post #3 accurate? It’s what I have heard when listening to people who generally try to be accurate in using foreign names/words, but it’s done “by ear” so I question my results.
It’s an unvoiced, aspirated alveolo-palatal africate. Your explanation is reasonable; to me, though, it sounds considerably more sibilant than the English “j”. I can’t describe it better than that (phonology is not my best subject.) It doesn’t, to me, sound like a stop at all, and it’s not represented by “k” in Wade-Giles. It is, however, a very clipped sound as you indicated. And because it’s unaspirated, it sounds more like English “j” than “ch” (even though Mandarin doesn’t have voiced consonants, other than nasals and liquids.) I can’t really trust my Mandarin pronunciation to give a better explanation than that - while I have a reasonable ear for such things, I wouldn’t want to make extravagant claims about Mandarin phonology. “j” is the closest you’ll get among English’s sound inventory.
I should also note that Mandarin is the native language of quite a large part of China and while there is an official, government-promulgated standard, its phonology can differ quite a bit from place to place. My professors have been from quite a few different places (for example, currently, I’m taught by Dr. Wang, from Beijing, who uses the extra “r” sounds characteristic of Beijing speech, and Ms. Wang, who’s from Taiwan, and whose pronunciation is quite a bit different.) It’s very possible than some more southerly Mandarin dialects retain “k” sounds due to influence from other Chinese languages, but that’s just a WAG. The alveolo-palatals are a little more uniform across the Mandarin-speaking area than the retroflexes, but I’m sure pronunciation does differ some from place to place.
In Cantonese, the Chinese capital is pronounced ‘Buck-ging’ (roughly).
In French, they call it Pekin - pronounced ‘Pay-kahn’ (again, roughly)
‘Peking’ is the result of some westerners repeating what some Chinese called it. Obviously there were no Mandarin/Pinyin style nazis around at the time.
Beiping does indeed mean northern peace. It was used briefly during early Republican China (Sunyat Sen et al) after the Manchus had been kicked out of Beijing. During that period Nanjing was the capital.
The capital of China has moved many time throughout it’s long history. Beijing was known as Dadu, meaning Great City, during Kubla Khan’s reign.