Well, such was my assumption, anyway :).
- Tamerlane
I’d advise reading about the Wade-Giles system of transliteration. It was in no way “filtered through Cantonese”. The letter “K” in Wade-Giles was sincerely intended to represent the sound which in Pinyin is “j”. Thus we have Peking - Beijing, and Tao Te King - Daodejing.
UnuMondo
As for when: according to the Indian Embassy in Washington D.C., the name was officially changed in December of 2000. I ran across this while doing research for my column on the Black Hole of Calcutta/Kolkata.
I concede incorrectness of theory.
No, Bengalis have never called the city “Kolkotta.” The pronunciation is closer to the current spelling, “Kolkata.” It’s an “ah,” not an “o,” and it’s a single “t.”
The motivations for the name change are numerous and complex and more related to local politics than to cultural pride.
Let’s please shrug off this notion of “inability.” It was the Anglicised pronunciation of some word. Which word it was is not precisely known, although the most widely accepted theory is that the original word was “Kalighat” (the step of Kali), which is still the name of an important place in the city. If so, then the Anglicized pronunciation “Calcutta” is no more “wrong” (and perhaps less so) than the Bengali pronuncation “Kolkata.”
For what it’s worth, when I was in India a couple of years ago my hosts referred to a city named Kolkata (pronounced Koll’ kah tah, with the emphasis on the first syllable). Since in the U.S. I had always heard it referred to as Calcutta (Kal kut’ ah), it took quite a while before I understood that Kolkata and Calcutta were the same city.
And everyone (all my Indian hosts) referred to Madras (old name) as Channai (new name), yet they also referred to Bombay as Bombay rather than the new name of Mumbai. (The company I worked for at the time had offices in both Channai and Mumbai. We were encouraged by the HR department to use these new names. I found that a bit puzzling since the people who actually lived there didn’t consistently use the new names.)
As far as Peking/Beijing is concerned, I never hear Peking anymore in the U.S. Everyone says Beijing. Not sure when the change came, but I think it started with the newscasters.
It seems to me that the Pinyin system is not good for native English speakers. So far as I am concerned, “b” is not a good transliteration for an unaspirated [p]. In that sense, Wade-Giles seems much better.
So far as Indian name changes goes, the postal service announced a couple of years ago (soon after the Mumbai and Chennai changes, I believe) that it would not recognise any further name changes for the purpose of addressing letters.
I’m suprised. In Calcutta itself, Calcutta and Kolkata are used interchangeably in conversation and in writing (that is, as has been noted before, where it isn’t simply shortened to “Cal”). The tendency is to use “Calcutta” when speaking English and “Kolkata” when speaking Bengali, although this rule is not consistently applied. Only for official and formal purposes (like news broadcasts) is “Kolkata” stuck to consistently.
Pinyin was invented for the benefit of the Chinese people. It is not intended for English speakers. The values of some letters (like Q) have nothing to do with thier values in English or other Western languages. Not to mention that English is possibly the worst representative of the values given to the Latin alphabet and Spanish, Italian and Romanina would be much more representative.
The B in Beijing sounds like a B to me but B and P are so close that they can be mistaken and even exchanged sometimes. It sems to me a P is a B with a bit more force in the “explosive part”.
Try reading the following out aloud to someone and tell them to write it down: “I need a drink. I think I’ll go down to the par”. I doubt anyone would pick on the P in par. They will hear a B.
The capital of Formosa is variously spelled as Taipei or Taibei. Taibei is correct hanyu pinyin (the same bei = north). I do not think you can tell the difference by pronouncing it with a P or with a B. They sound practically the same.
Individual accents and regional variations produce wider variety of pronunciations than the subtle difference between P and B in Beijing.
I’d dearly love to see a citation, sailor, that Pinyin was invented for the benefit of the Chinese–especially since the Chinese are kind of into writing Chinese in Chinese.
What makes you believe otherwise? Do you really think the chinese developed pinyin for the benefit of Americans? It was developed in the 1950s. Do you really think it was developed to help Americans?
Pinyin is the last of several attempts to replace Chinese characters with a phonetic alphabet with the purpose of simplyfing reading. http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/chinese/aspect/history.html It was developed in the 1950s and officially adopted in 1958. The Lonely Planet guide says:
To continue the hijack
Sailor, I’m going to have to disagree on Taipei versus Taibei. If one pronounces “Taipei” on the mainland, few if any people will know what you’re talking about. However, pronounced “Taibei” and most people will know it’s the capital of Taiwan. I personally cringe each and every time I hear someone pronounce it Taipei.
Not quite sure how one can think that B and P are interchangeable sounds. “The big bee went back of the bar” or “The pig pea went pack of the par.”
Using locals to determain pronounciation may be difficult. After all did you ever hear a person from The Bronx or Brooklyn pronounce New York?
Actually, to be precise, the difference is one of voicing. Your vocal cords vibrate when you say a B, but not when you say a P. Complicating matters for English speakers is the fact that when a P comes at the beginning of a word it is always aspirated – note the difference between the P in pot and the P in spot. There are many languages where the presence or absence of aspiration on a letter can change the meaning of a word, much like how in English the voicing makes the difference between a par and a bar.
I’ve heard someone slowly speak words whose only difference was a lack of aspiration on the P that started it – the P did sound more like a B compared to P’s I’m used to starting words, but more like a P when compared to an actual B.
– Dragonblink, Linguistics Major Extraordinaire.
Eek! I mean, when it comes at the beginning of an English word, when spoken by a native speaker of most dialects.
UNUMONDO-Wade-giles is used for gwau-eu (mandarin). The system for cantonese is yale, or yale modifyied. THere for in cantonese it is pronounced bak-eing (or close)
Spelling and grammer subject to change with out notice
I told you the spelling may change!!
sailor, I think you might be thinking of zhuyin.
According to this page at the University of Michigan:
That’s not to say that Pinyin hasn’t proved tremendously useful to China since its adoption (postal sorting, computer data entry), but I don’t think that was the primary reason for its existence.
jjim, that page can say whatever it wants but all the evidence I have and common sense tell me that Hanyu Pinyin was not developed for teaching foreigners. Just think about it.
In 1949 the Communist revolution finally succeeds in China after years of struggles and civil war. The new Communist government starts developing and implementing revolutionary policies of change. And one of them is to develop a system of writing to help foreigners learn Chinese? Come on! This was a time when China practically shut itself off from the world. It closed all its embassies abroad. I cannot believe they were interested in teaching English tio any foreigners.
Russian experts were coming to China in droves to help the new government in every aspect. Russian experts recommended simplifying the writing system and, in fact, first proposed they adopt the cyrillic alphabet but the Chinese decided to adopt the Latin alphabet as more suitable. Still, Hanyu Pinyin was developed with the help and advice of Russian experts. Are you telling me the circumstances would lead you to believe it was done for the benefit of foreigners? What foreigners? It makes no sense to me. It makes much more sense to me to believe the communist government wanted to simplify and rationalize the writing just like they were doing with their sweeping reforms in every other field.
Hanyu Pinyin did not finally replace Chinese characters for the same reason the metric system did not replace the American system of units. Custom dies hard. Replacing the old system of writing would require several generations being equally familiar with both.
Istanbul was once Constantinople. Seems rather Byzantine to me.
Peace,
moriah of Pahree and Moonchin.
Thai has a three-way distinction in its stop consonants: voiceless aspirated /p[sup]h[/sup]/, voiceless unaspirated /p/, voiced unaspirated /b/.
It all depends on when the stop’s closure is released compared to when the vocal cords begin to vibrate. If the vocal cord vibrations begin after the closure is released, the result is a voiceless aspirate. If the vocal cord vibrations begin roughly simultaneously with the closure release, the result is a voiceless non-aspirate. If the vocal cord vibrations begin before the closure is released, the result is a voiced non-aspirate.