Thursday 27 January 2022

beijing or peking?

There are several ways of talking about the historical capital of China:

Names of Beijing - Wikipedia

Interestingly, the city is called Peking in other European languages:

Peking – Wikipedia (German)

Pekín - Wikipedia, la enciclopedia libre (Spanish)

Pékin — Wikipédia (French)

So, it seems to be just an English thing:

HERE is an odd thing. The Chinese government gets quite cross about English-speakers using the name Peking for their capital city, insisting on the more modern transliteration Beijing... The Spanish are allowed to talk about Pekín and so it goes on...

Beijing or Peking? | The Economist

Here's a good video which explains the difference:

Peking Never Changed Its Name To Beijing - YouTube

And here's an excellent article in this week's New European:

Don’t duck the Peking question

PETER TRUDGILL on why cities have different names... 

It is often said that the capital of China “changed its name” from Peking to Beijing, but that is not really what happened. The forms Peking and Beijing are both transliterations into the Latin alphabet of the same Chinese name. (Beijing means ‘northern capital’, Nanjing ‘southern capital’.)
Naturally, Peking/Beijing is written by Chinese-speaking people using their own non-alphabetic writing system. For us to read it, this has to be converted into our alphabet. This conversion of Chinese logograms into the Latin alphabet is known as “romanisation”.
The so-called change of the name simply involved an older romanisation system, which rendered the Chinese name as Peking, being replaced by a new system, which transliterated the name using a different sequence of Latin-alphabet letters. The advocates of the new system believed their transliteration gave a better representation of the modern Chinese pronunciation...
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The case of Bombay is rather different. Bombay did not “change its name” to Mumbai. In the local language, Marathi – which has about 75 million speakers – the name of the city had been Mumbai for a very long time. Unlike in China, however, English is one of the official languages of India – it is the major language of inter-regional communication. And so while the Indian government cannot instruct English-speaking people around the world on how to pronounce their own language, they can legislate as to how the English-language names of Indian cities are to be written in India, on official documents and public signage. The English language name Bombay was officially changed to Mumbai by the Indian government in 1995.
This change was the result of pressure from Marathi nationalists. These people felt that Bombay was a legacy of British colonial oppression – which it really was not, because the city’s name in Hindi, the largest Indian language, also was and still is Bambai...
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