People spelling names.

[Kalafrana]

'I think it's just entertaining to see common nouns misspelled, but misspellings in more formal usage, like proper names, titles, headlines and for example signatures (you have misspelled "Nagorny" in yours, rosieposie :-) have a tendency to irritate me. Indeed I find misspelling proper names from foreign languages or cultures quite offensive, particularly because it's often done by "dominant cultures" like the Anglophone one. To me it says: We just don't think it (and indirectly you) are important enough to care.'

Not just names from foreign languages or cultures. I go through life having my surnames misspelt and get rather fed up with that, so I do make an effort to get other people's right. To be fair, with Russian names there is the problem of transliterations, which inevitably produces variations.

Now will someone please explain why the Chinese city we westerners all knew as Peking suddenly became Beijing a few years ago.

[Naslednik Norvezhskiy]

Now will someone please explain why the Chinese city we westerners all knew as Peking suddenly became Beijing a few years ago.

Hehe, please don't feel old when I say that I've never known it as anything else than Beijing. :-)

Wikipedia has some very enlightening information:
The term Peking originated with French missionaries four hundred years ago and corresponds to an older pronunciation predating a subsequent sound change in Mandarin from [kʲ] to [tɕ] ([tɕ] is represented in pinyin as j, as in Beijing). It is still used in many languages.
The pronunciation "Peking" is also closer to the Fujianese dialect of Amoy or Min Nan spoken in the city of Xiamen, a port where European traders first landed in the 16th century, while "Beijing" more closely approximates the Mandarin dialect's pronunciation.

Since [ p ] and [ b ] merely are the voiceless and voiced varities of the bilabial plosive, the most interesting difference between Peking and Beijing is a level of palatalisation, which plays such an important part in Russian. Literal Peking is unpalatalized; original, ancient Chinese /beɪ'kʲɪŋ/ is palatalized à la russe and modern Chinese /beɪ'tɕɪŋ/ contains the rare voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative [ɕ] found in Russian счастью [ˈɕɕasʲtʲju] (meaning "happyness" in the dative case"). This rare sound, articulated a little further forward towards the teeth than palatals, is indeed rare in European languages: Apart from Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Serbian) it's allegedly only found in Swedish, Danish and the Thuringian dialect of German!

The English pronounciation of Beijing, /beɪˈdʒɪŋ/ or /beɪˈʒɪŋ/), is thus strictly a little off the mark, using a postalveolar sound instead of an alveolo-palatal, but frankly I can't hear the difference when listening to this sound sample from the German Wikipedia of the Mandarin pronounciation. But I like the Mandarin intonation. Being a native speaker of a tonal language (Norwegian), it's approximately how I naturally would have pronounced the name had I seen it written as a native Norwegian word (i.e. Beikjing)! :-)

It's funny that sometimes Norwegian and Swedish can have sounds and tones not found in Western Europe at all, but shared with Russian and Asian languages. Makes you wonder if we Scandinavians (and Russians!) are more descended from those Sami, Ugric and other "aboriginals" you find scattered from the Barents Sea across Siberia to the Bering Strait than we appear to today. (BTW a Norwegian travel writer did write that upon returning to Norway after a long absence he was struck by the high, Asiatic cheekbones of his fellow countrymen.)

[rosieposie]

"Peking"  As I child I also thought Bejing was the capital, although I always associate Peking with Peking duck.

Just curious speaking of cities (off topic) Was St Petersburg changed to Leningard to Stalingard and back to St Petersburg??

[Naslednik Norvezhskiy]

Just curious speaking of cities (off topic) Was St Petersburg changed to Leningard to Stalingard and back to St Petersburg??

No, Stalingrad is another city, now and formerly known as Volgograd - and before all that as Tsaritsyn.

[Kalafrana]

Roerik

Many thanks for your erudite response.

I first heard Beijing around 1983 - before that it was always Peking.

Ann

[Margot]

I went through Prep school referring to the capital of China as Peking and then suddenly when I got to big school it was Beijing! I always wondered why but now I just think of it as Peking but in conversation always refer to it as Beijing! Interestingly I have a huge 1941 world map which uses the name Peiping! This was used for a while as an alternative name!

[Kalafrana]

When I was at junior school in the late 1960s there were still plenty of geography books which referrred to Palestine.

But the best anachronism I've come across were the prayer books in the church where my uncle was vicar in the late 1970s. The state prayers referred to 'Alexandra, the Queen Mother' - Queen Alexandra, who died in 1925!

Ann

[RomanovMartyrs]

Just curious speaking of cities (off topic) Was St Petersburg changed to Leningard to Stalingard and back to St Petersburg??

Roerik is right

St. Petersburg was first St. Pete, then changed it to Petrograd during WWI to make it sound more Russian, less German. Then the Soviets changed it to Leningrad because anything with Peter in it was too Tsar-y. (Yes, I know it wasn't named for Peter the Great, but instead the Saint, but even so, Orthodoxy was a symbol of imperial Russia.) Thank goodness it's back to St. Petersburg now! Though many signs, buildings, and even Russians still refer to it as Leningrad.


On an unrelated note, the spelling that's always bothered me is Standart because it doesn't even sound like that in Russian pronunciation or spelling. More correctly it'd be Shtandart and I can't comprehend the reason for the mis-transliteration, unless most non-Russian speakers have a hard time with the Sh and t so close together..?

[nena]

I think German speakers have no problems when reading 'Standart', although the first 'S' pronounces in Germain the same way as 'Sh' in Russian. I agree, Shtandart would be more precise form. Actually I am not having problems with Russian transliteration, so I understand what people mean when saying names of Russian royalty and noble families. Well, as saying goes by, Nomen est omen, and every name means something. (Me not to go deeper in names' meanings).

[Naslednik Norvezhskiy]

I first heard Beijing around 1983 - before that it was always Peking.

I feel so old then, being born just before Peking became Beijing!

On an unrelated note, the spelling that's always bothered me is Standart because it doesn't even sound like that in Russian pronunciation or spelling. More correctly it'd be Shtandart and I can't comprehend the reason for the mis-transliteration, unless most non-Russian speakers have a hard time with the Sh and t so close together..?

The mistransliteration must be due to the name being so similar to an existing English noun, because English-speakers and most other speakers of West European languages don't have any problems with the voiceless postalveolar fricative [ ʃ ], written sh, sch, ch, š etc. Notable exceptions are Castillian Spanish and - untill the last generations: My own native West Norwegian. (In which it's still expanding, now also on the expense of the [ ç ] - the voiceless palatal fricative as in English "hue".)

These two dialects are thus on the more conservative side in this issue, as this sound is relatively new in the European languages. For example there is no separate letter for it in the ancient Runic, Latin and Greek alphabets - the latter case being one example why there was a need to create a separate Cyrillic alphabet for the Slavic languages at the time.

Though if we get really nitpicky, the first letter in Штандартъ (Shtandart) seems to be the voiceless retroflex fricative [ ʂ ], a very similarly articulated sound found in very few languages, among them Russian, Swedish and East Norwegian! In the latter two it is a contraction of a s and an alveolar r, e.g. in Swedish fors [fɔʂ], meaning "waterfall".

[Naslednik Norvezhskiy]

If we go back to spelling, I am almost equally shocked every time I see Fabergé spelled without the acute accent. It somehow manages to spoil the sophisticated extravagance that was Fabergé.

[rosieposie]

I don't know how to do the accent with the e hence why I don't do it.

[Naslednik Norvezhskiy]

I don't know how to do the accent with the e hence why I don't do it.

From Wikipedia:
"Windows users can type an "é" by holding the "Alt" key down and dialing either 130 or 0233 (on the numeric pad of the keyboard): alt + 130; alt + 0233. Windows users can type "É" by holding the "Alt" key down and dialing either 144 or 0201.
On US International and UK English keyboard layouts users can more simply access the acute accent letter 'É' by holding down the "AltGR" key whilst typing the 'E' key on the keyboard. This method can also be applied to many other acute accented letters which do not appear on the standard US English keyboard layout.
In Microsoft Word, a user can press Ctrl + ' (apostrophe), then E for "é".
On Mac OS X a user can hold option and press e to get ´, then press e and they will get é.
In X Window using a compose key, a user can press the compose key followed by ' (apostrophe) and e (in either order) to get é."
For users with Linux-based operative systems (like Ubuntu), the Unicode for é is U+00E9 and U+00C9 for É.

[Kalafrana]

I must try this!

Ann

[Naslednik Norvezhskiy]

I must try this!

Please do! Windows has Alt Codes (just do a Google search for them) for most characters and in Linux-based (and newer Windows) operative systems they are even more accessible through Unicode, in which you can write all sorts of outlandish stuff, e.g.:
For me, in Linux-based Ubuntu, holding Ctrl and Shift down, U16B1  U16A2  U16E6  U16C1  U16B4  U16B1 give ᚱᚢᛦᛁᚴᚱ = ruRikr = Rurik, like he would have written it in his own native runes!
Again, holding Ctrl and Shift down, U5317 and U4EAC give 北京 which equals Beijing, discussed above!