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fiendishrabbit t1_j6fju4s wrote

Reply to comment by series_hybrid in ELI5: How do they come up with names for countries in foreign languages? by bentobam

Peking is actually a victim of european pronounciation drift. When we started spelling it Peking (17th century) the pronounciation of those letters were relatively close to the chinese pronounciation. Then the p:s hardened and the normal pronounciation of k:s became /k/ instead of /ʒ/

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furrykef t1_j6gpdka wrote

No, that's not it at all.

The p sound didn't change, either in Europe or in China. The Wade-Giles romanization system recognized that Mandarin Chinese doesn't distinguished voiced and unvoiced consonants like European languages, but rather aspirated and unaspirated. So p' (with an apostrophe) was used for an aspirated p sound and a plain p was used for an unaspirated one.

Unfortunately, these apostrophes were frequently omitted by people uninterested in accurate Chinese pronunciation, so one often saw things such as "Tang dynasty" instead of "T'ang dynasty". For that reason among others, a new romanization system called Pinyin was developed. Now an aspirated t was written t instead of t' (incidentally making "Tang dynasty" actually correct) and an unaspirated one was written d. Likewise, an unaspirated p was now written b, and so that's why Beijing starts with a b.

As for king becoming jing, that was a Chinese pronunciation shift, not a European one. The letter k has not changed in pronunciation much in over 2000 years.

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