this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
482 points (97.8% liked)
memes
10203 readers
3388 users here now
Community rules
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
Sister communities
- !tenforward@lemmy.world : Star Trek memes, chat and shitposts
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world : Lemmy Shitposts, anything and everything goes.
- !linuxmemes@lemmy.world : Linux themed memes
- !comicstrips@lemmy.world : for those who love comic stories.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This will sound weird, but if I say it "in English" it's Bei-zhing, and if I say it in Chinese it's Běi-jīng, and that J isn't really a phoneme we have in English anyway. So nobody's really pronouncing it right.
A name from a tonal language will never sound entirely right in English, though I got used to pronouncing “-jing” with the “j” sound from “jiffy”. For a while, I thought the “zh” sound was correct, partly because other people said it that way, and partly because it sounded plausibly exotic, until I discovered that there was actually a phenomenon for this mistake called hyperforeignism.
I'm familiar with the phenomenon, what I'm saying is "j" in pinyin represents a phoneme that we don't actually use in English. Ironically, the "zh" sound in pinyin is probably a closer approximation to the "j" sound in "jiffy". The hyperforeignism of Beijing seems to be from misapplying the reading rules for French, not Mandarin, so it's an interesting case, but both pronunciations are only approximations.