Naw, that was just to fuck with the Western Roundeyes.
“Peking” is our name for their capital, just like “Germany” is our name for “Deutschland” .
Only dickheads demand other change the historical word.
But we usually give in to the dickheads. 
The thing is- it just sounds wrong and it’s open to misunderstanding. Say :“Good English is his forte”- and it can be misunderstood that you mean “fort” as in “fortification”.
Peking is the name in the Wade-Giles romanization system for Mandarin Chinese for the name of the city. Beijing is the name for it in the Pinyin romanization system. There’s no such thing as an absolutely definitive romanization system for any of the Chinese languages (or Chinese dialects, as they’re miscalled), because the definitive name for something in any of the Chinese languages is the Chinese characters used for that name. To make it clear to non-Chinese speakers how the Chinese pronounce a character though, there were various romanization systems invented which used the Latin alphabet to indicate the pronunciation. One such Romanization system was the Wade-Giles system, which was more popular in the early twentieth century. It was for a while accepted by most of the world as the standard way of spelling Chinese names. More recently, a romanization system called Pinyin was invented which does a better job (it’s usually agreed) of representing the pronunciation of Chinese. The Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan) preferred the Wade-Giles system, while the People’s Republic of China (what we now think of as China) preferred the Pinyin system, so until we (the U.S.) recognized China in 1979, we used the Wade-Giles system for most things. Now we use the Pinyin system for most purposes in the U.S.
Presumably you meant “homonym”?
That’s okay. As they, “To air is human…”
Rivkah was getting at “homophone” - differently-spelled words that sound alike (e.g. our/hour, cent/scent, etc.).
“Homonyms” are look-alikes – same spelling, different pronunciatins (e.g. “**Read **me this book … I **read **that already”.).
From the very first definition of homonym from dictionary.com:
- Phonetics. a word pronounced the same as another but differing in meaning, whether spelled the same way or not, as heir and air;
And yes I know that it also lists homophone in the definition of homonym.
I think the word you’re looking for is “homograph”.
In any event, I stand by my post as written and believe I used the word correctly.
Since we’re in General Questions, do you have a cite for this claim? It seems highly unlikely to me.
Anthropologists didn’t exist two centuries ago. Neither, really, did linguists. I’d like to see your citation too.
dictionary.com is on crack. Homonym - same name. Homophone - same sound.
I’m still waiting to see an episode of The Big Bang Theory in which someone points out to Sheldon that he’s been mispronouncing “coitus” for the past seven years.
I don’t have a subscription to oed so I can’t read the cite you linked to. But it doesn’t matter.
I am aware that in formal/technical settings, “homonym” strictly refers to words that are both homophones and a homographs.
However, plenty of people use “homonym” to refer to either homophones or homographs. A simple on-line search of dictionaries and articles on the subject confirms this. It is not wrong in non-formal/non-technical settings no matter what some may want to believe. This is accepted usage and not liking it isn’t going to change it.
And bordelond is incorrect. While homonym can be used to mean the same thing as homograph, that is not the only definition of homonym as his post suggests.
And he gets it wrong again when he says that they are “look-alikes – same spelling, different pronunciatins.” [sic]
Homographs are not required to have different pronunciations as he apparently believes. And in fact for a homograph to be a “true” homonym, it would be the opposite of what he says - the words would have to have the same pronunciations.
What RivkahChaya wrote was wrong. What bordelond wrote is wrong. At worst, a case could be made that I wasn’t right. But I was not wrong.
Really? How do you pronounce it?
Link to recorded dictionary pronunciations both US and British.
In any case, with names of foreign origin like this it’s just as well. Unless you have acquired near-native fluency in the language, nobody should expect you to pronounce its names as a native would. You’ll only confuse people, and some may even regard it as ostentatious.
“Prolly” for probably.
And yes, it does seem that mispronounced, and occasionally misused, words are becoming standard, chiefly because a normative standard is increasingly viewed as elitist. As pointless as some of the prescriptive rules of English usage may be, other rules of grammar, usage, and pronunciation serve to facilitate communication and mutual intelligibility. I’ve mentioned it before but there was the online discussion I once read about suburban sprawl, housing, and public transit. When somebody piped up about “tracks” everywhere, it took me a minute to realize they meant housing tracts, not railroad tracks. The change from /kt/ to /k/ is a huge one, and I hear it all the time–e.g. “true facks”, “digestive track”, and so on.
The simplification of consonant clusters is very common in the evolution of language; just try to find on in any of the major Romance languages. I’m sure the same thing is happening in English today.
But I don’t have to like it!
Another language thread headed toward ninedee posts…
Happens all the time in American English, too. Any plural ending with a voiced consonant, the “s” becomes voiced, i.e., a “z” sound.
Counter link. (That said, I say it with the “oy” sound myself.)
I’m an oy guy too. Never have I heard it pronounced coe-it-us.
“gaol.”
enough said.
I know that, I was pointing out the silliness of insisting “analyse” makes more sense than “analyze.”