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What seemed weird when I visited your country

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Mlle Germain:
Thanks for you long answer, Akima! Your suit metaphor is very instructive.

Re: Ben. :roll: Somehow I don't think me willing to try pronouncing names that do not come from a European language as correctly as possible in order to acknowledge people's identity instead of expecting them to take on a name from my culture that has nothing to do with them is part of any "illusional twinkly-eyed multi-cultural nirvana". But this is not the Discuss Forum, so I'll leave my respsonse at that.

jwhouk:
When I was growing up, we called it "Peking."

 :angel:

Mlle Germain:
In German, "Peking" is still used very often.
But I wouldn't really call that a mispronounciation so much as a different name for a city in a different language/ adapting the city name to a different language. That happens with practically all major cities in almost every language! Köln is "Cologne" in English, München is "Munich", Berlin and Hamburg are written the same, but the pronounciation is anglicised. Paris is also written the same, but pronounced English. In German, London is still called London, but pronounced in a German way. Strasbourg (which is of course extremely close to the German border and in an area historically heavily influenced by Germany) is also called Straßburg, a German version of the name. Every English speaker knows the Polish capital Warszawa as Warsaw, and German speakers as Warschau. I could go on; there are plenty more examples.
To be honest, I don't really see a problem adapting geographical names to other languages if they are also commonly used in that language. I'm not offended if English speakers don't pronounce German cities German.

I am also not offended by people pronouncing my first name as it would be pronounced in English; it is still my name.
Both of these are still very different from expecting (There are historic examples of people actually being forced to change their names in similar situations) a group of people to take on completely different personal names that have no connection to their previous name, I would say.

Edit: I just thought of of a scenario I hadn't thought of before: Colonial powers often changed geographical names of places in their colonies or named the places in their language and those colonial names inevitably have connotations of the often brutal and oppressive colonial period and do not take into account the culture of the native inhabitants. In such cases I find it more respectful and adequate to stop using that name and change to using the name that the actual inhabitants/ owners of the land use (examples that come to my mind first are aboriginal sacred sites like Uluru and Kata Tjuta in Australia that have today been returned to the administration of the native inhabitants of the land). There are more such cases around the world, especially in Africa.
Is Beijing maybe one of them, too? Of course, China was never a British colony, but still there is a problematic period in Anglo-Chinese history. Does "Peking" come from that period?
In any case, it puzzles me why English speakers would want to pronounce Beijing any differently than Bay-Jing. I mean, this is precisely how the "J"-sound is usually pronounced in English words!

Akima:

--- Quote from: Mlle Germain on 06 Jun 2014, 06:58 ---Of course, China was never a British colony, but still there is a problematic period in Anglo-Chinese history. Does "Peking" come from that period?
--- End quote ---
You mean that not all of China was a British colony; you are forgetting Hong Kong, Weihai, and the quasi-colony of the Shanghai International Settlement. The British imperial boot was not removed from China's face until 1997. So yes, a problematic period only recently ended (though it pales utterly in brutality, if not duration, compared with the period of Japanese imperialism in  China). The name Peking was used during that period, but is not regarded as particularly of it. Peking was in use long before the First Opium War kicked off the Century of Humiliation. It derives from the pronunciation of the characters 北京 in the dialects spoken in the southern ports through which Portuguese traders and missionaries first entered China in the 16th century. Bay-jing is simply the northern pronunciation of the same characters, because Standard Mandarin (pǔtōnghuà) is based on northern dialects. Peking preserves the syllable-structure of the Chinese in a way that Beige-ing does not and is really far more legitimate. I have written before about the many ways in which Westerners and Chinese people have managed to misunderstand one another.


--- Quote ---In any case, it puzzles me why English speakers would want to pronounce Beijing any differently than Bay-Jing. I mean, this is precisely how the "J"-sound is usually pronounced in English words!
--- End quote ---
Exactly. The soft French-style pronunciation of the J in Beijing is alien to both Chinese and English. Noam Chomsky argues that we exoticise the "other" in language, and that for many English-speakers, the default exotic is French. :P 

GarandMarine:
I think I pronounce Beijing "Bey-Jing" but that's probably a regional English thing on the first vowel.

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