Warrl wrote:Seriously, how did anyone ever think that the name of China's capitol city should begin with a P?
According to Wiki, the various P- names (Peking, Peiping, Pequin, Pechinum) may reflect the pronunciations in the Nanjing dialect, and/or in various Southern Chinese dialects that were used in the port cities visited by Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Remember, "Chinese" is not a single spoken language. It's a family of dozens of separate but related dialects, often with very different spoken vocabularies and pronunciations, which share a single common
symbolic (non-phonetic) written language which contains a huge number of symbols.
The classic example of this is Cantonese vs. Mandarin. Native speakers of these two dialects generally cannot communicate verbally to a useful extent... but (assuming they're literate in Chinese) they can write out their messages to one another and be understood perfectly well.
I ran across
http://www.chinese-lessons.com/conversi ... ndarin.htm which shows some of the sound correspondences between these two dialects. They're definitely not 1-to-1.
It looks as if most of the Mandarin sounds with begin with the voiced "b", can sometimes have as their closest equivalent a Cantonese sound which starts with an unvoiced "p". Similarly, Mandarin sounds beginning with "p" may sometimes map to a Cantonese sound starting with a voiced "b".
Add to this, the fact that the city now known most popularly as "Beijing" has had at least a dozen different names over the course of its history, and things get even more confusing. Also, these names often bear political meanings: "Beijing" means "Northern capital" (which the Communist government stressed as a symbol of its political legitimacy) while the Western governments tended to insist on "Peiping" (which means "Northern peace" or "Northern plains") as a sideways method of asserting that the Communist-ruled city wasn't really the capital of China (they were backing the Taiwanese government as being the rightful government body, albeit displaced by rebels).
So, the city may be pronounced "Smith", but it's actually spelled "Mangrove Throat-Warbler".