Why we say "Beizhing" and not "Beijing"

Language Log 2019-05-11

Well, I don't say "Beizhing", and I think it sounds ghastly, so much so that I cringe when I hear it and my flesh creeps. I never could figure out why English speakers would use this hideous pronunciation when it would be so much easier, transparent, and direct just to pronounce the name the way it looks: "bei-", like "bay", as in "Beirut" (we don't have any trouble with that, do we?), and "-jing" as in "jingle". BEI- -JING! Voilà! We don't have to say "bei- -zhing". I realize, though, that almost everybody, including many China specialists who surely know better, say "Beizhing", not "Beijing".

Finally, an anonymous curmudgeonly correspondent offers some reasons for how it came about:

On the egregious mainstream pronunciation of 'Beijing' in English

Since both dʒ and ʒ are pronounceable in English, this is a puzzling convention of mysterious origin. How did the convention come about? Pure speculation:

1) Axiom: exotic peoples make exotic sounds. 'The Chinese' are exotic. And ʒ is a mostly exotic sound in English (associated especially with French and Russian). On top of which, Hanyu Pinyin is full of the digraph <zh>, which could hardly be anything other than ʒ , right? ('Brezhnev'). So, obviously this language is simply full of ʒ!

2) Back when 'Peking' was replaced by 'Beijing' in journalism, cretins in the BBC Pronunciation Unit got Wade-Giles <j> (= HP <r-> = [ʐ ~ɻ]*) and Hanyu Pinyin <j> (= unaspirated ʨ confused. Thus 'Beijing' with ʒ became the BBC pronunciation. Thanks to the prestige of the BBC, this pronunciation swept the entire Anglophony. Remember that these were the days of shortwave-radio and BBC World Service.

*the more old fashioned first value for which is acoustically the same as or identical to ʒ and especially Russian <ж>, which is sometimes claimed to be retroflexed.

Never mind how Mandarin and other Sinitic topolect speakers say "New York", "San Francisco", "Ürümchi", and so forth, we have no excuse for saying "Beizhing" instead of "Beijing".

P.S: I realize there are other theories about why Anglophones have been duped into saying "Beizhing" instead of "Beijing", but I don't think they're as convincing as the one put forward by the curmudgeonly correspondent who submitted the above explanation.

In my next post, I'll let a Beijinger explain how she says it, which is not how the name is spoken in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM).

Readings

"Jingle bells, pedophile" (12/7/09)

"How they say 'Beijing' in Beijing" (8/18/08)