Mandarin (fwd)

[Loren A. Billings]

Dear colleagues:

I sent out a comment on "Peking" a few days ago.  A few of my details were
in error.  As it so happens, the original poster of the thread knows
Chinese well.  Here is Keith's correction, which he sent to me.  I post it
to the list with his permission and my apologies for the inaccuracies.

Before doing so, however, I should point out that Max made his point with
me.  While it *is* grating to my ear to do without _the_, it does matter
to many people that I omit it.  As a native Oregonian I really hate it
when people from the Eastern United States pronounce the last syllable in
_Oregon_ as homophonous with _gone_.  I recognize as a linguist that this
is due to the differences in vowel reduction in these versions of English.
Most journalistic organizations specifically prescribe reduction to
_...g at n_ (where @ = schwa).  Of course, this pronunciation is not a matter
of syntax; nor is it pejorative to "mispronounce" this place name.  Still,
there is something about respecting those who live or come from there by
pronouncing it as they desire.  The same goes for Ukraine.

Best,  --Loren Billings (a long way from home, in Tallahassee)

Forwarded message:
> From keg at violet.berkeley.edu Wed Mar 27 18:29:42 1996
> From: keg at violet.berkeley.edu
> Message-Id: <v02130501ad7f7b458860@[136.152.115.137]>
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
> X-Mailer: Eudora Pro 2.1.3
> Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 15:31:32 -0800
> To: billings at mailer.fsu.edu
> Subject: Mandarin
>
> Loren,
>
> >The name of the city was pronounced _Beijing_ (literally:  'north(ern)
> >capital' --specifically, with an initial aspirated bilabial stop,
>
> actually it's an unaspirated voiceless bilabial stop -- as opposed to the
> pinyin /p/, which is aspirated
>
> >transliterated as _b_ in this system, and a medial aspirated affricate,
> >transliterated as _j_
>
> again, the pinyin /j/ is a voiceless unaspirated palatal affricate, opposed
> to the pinyin /q/, which is aspirated
>
> >since voicing is not distinctive in Han Chinese
>
> Han is generally an ethnonym, not used to refer to the language -- better
> to say that voicing is not distinctive in Mandarin dialects, at least for
> obstruents (though I did a paper [I think you were there, at GURT?] on
> retroflex neutralization in dialectal Polish and Mandarin, and I still
> believe that there is a voiced obstruent in Mandarin...).
>
> > so they re-named it _Peping_ (pinyin _Beiping_) 'north(ern) *beauty*
>
> actually, the *ping* part here is 'peace' -- so bei3ping2 is 'northern
> peace' as opposed to bei3jing1 'northern capital'...always struck me as
> kind of stupid, personally.  (I mean, there was already [as you pointed
> out] nan2jing1 for 'southern capital', and dong1jing1 [aka Tokyo] for
> 'eastern capital'...why there is no xi1jing1 I don't know.  Then there's
> the city usually spelled in the west as Chungking, which makes it look like
> it should be zhong1jing1 'central capital', but here the name is really
> chong2qing4, which I'm not sure how to translate -- something like
> 'repeated blessings' or some such thing...
>
> I'm going to summarize the damn Ukraine thread in hopes that we will avert
> a Ukraino-British war...I knew the thread would do this...
>
> Keith
>
>
>