# Pronunciation of Kim Jong-Il

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pronunciation-of-kim-jong-il/558408>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [October 26, 2010, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pronunciation-of-kim-jong-il/558408 "2010-10-26T15:49:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2010, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pronunciation-of-kim-jong-il/558408/21 "2010-10-27T21:53:22Z")

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> [@psychonaut](#):
>
> But there is no [j] in Beijing, neither in the Chinese nor in any English pronunciation of it.

[j] is a convention meaning “the letter J” as opposed to /j/ “the sound of the letter Y in ‘yes.’” There is a [j] in Beijing: it’s the fourth letter in. There is no /j/ sound, neither in Chinese nor in any English pronunciation of it.

ETA: Of course there’s no [j] in Chinese full stop, only in the standard romanization of Chinese words. In that sense, both Beijing and Peking are attempts to render 北京 (pinyin běijīng).

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**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\
**Post date:** [October 27, 2010, 10:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pronunciation-of-kim-jong-il/558408/22 "2010-10-27T22:03:01Z")

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Too late for the edit window: I see that brackets are also used conventionally for phonetic IPA symbols, as opposed to slashes for phonemic IPA symbols. I’m not a linguist by profession, and the convention I’m used to is obviously non-standard, so I apologize for any confusion.

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