Ping-pong bing-bang

Xi Jinping commits another pronunciation gaffe.  Even if you don't know Mandarin, you can hear it clearly here because it is repeated over and over again.  Instead of saying "pīngpāng wàijiāo 乒乓外交" ("ping-pong diplomacy"), he says "bīngbāng wàijiāo 冰邦外交" ("ice states diplomacy"), which some wits are further distorting as "bīngbàng wàijiāo 冰棒外交" ("popsicle diplomacy"):

"冰邦"外交是什么鬼啦，你就真的离开稿子就话都不会说了呗#出洋相 #反正洋人听不懂 pic.twitter.com/hXXKbsYMTN

— 维尼大帝 (@RealEmperorPooh) June 29, 2019

There is a widespread misconception that ping-pong is a Chinese game, when in fact it "originated in Victorian England, where it was played among the upper-class as an after-dinner parlour game."  (Source).  The onomatopoeic name was in widespread use before the British manufacturer J. Jaques & Son Ltd trademarked it in 1901.  Every other supplier of equipment for the sport was forced to refer to it as "table tennis".  A similar situation ensued in the United States where Jacques sold the rights to the name "ping-pong" to Parker Brothers, which still owns it (and the lucrative Monopoly game as well).

The Mandarin translation of "table tennis" is zhuōqiú 桌球.

It's surpassingly strange that Xi JInping wouldn't know how to pronounce 乒乓 properly, since it was partly through "ping-pong diplomacy" that China broke down the Bamboo Curtain and reentered the stage of global politics in the early 70s.

In any event, for Xi Jinping to say "bīngbāng wàijiāo 冰邦外交" ("ice states diplomacy") instead of "pīngpāng wàijiāo 乒乓外交" ("ping-pong diplomacy") would seem to be a speech error and not a reading error, like so many of his other mistakes (see Readings) — unless he was relying on the script on the table in front of him.  In that case, he might have thought that 乒 and 乓 were derived from the decomposition of the ancient character bīng 兵 ("weapon; soldier"; there was also a Ming period [1368-1644} onomatopoeic use of this character, still read as bīng, to indicate the sound of collisions ), which is indeed the case, and so should be pronounced as bīng and bāng.  Consider Cantonese bing¹ bam¹ and Teochew bing¹ bong⁵ for 乒乓.

Whatever the cause of Xi's reading of 乒乓 as "bīngbāng" instead of its standard MSM pronunciation "pīngpāng" as indicated by the official Pinyin Romanization, it has occasioned much mirth in social and news media, e.g., this article.

Readings

• "More misreadings by Xi Jinping" (5/2/19)
• "More literary troubles for Xi Jinping" (1/3/19)
• "The face of censorship" (1/11/19)
• "Annals of literary vs. vernacular, part 2" (9/4/16)
• "Latin Caesar –> Tibetan Gesar –> Xi Jinpingian Sager" (3/20/18)
• "Pinyin for the Prez" (10/25/18)
• "Peking University president misreads an unobscure character: monumental implications" (5/5/18)
• "Xi Jinping's reading errors multiply" (12/28/18)
• "The political dangers of mispronunciation" (4/5/17)
• "Phonetic annotations as a welcome aid for learning how to read and write Sinographs" (4/26/19)
• "'War Symphony': a modern Chinese poem" (11/5/17) — if the video in the post doesn't play, try this
• "Graphic antipairs" (4/23/18)

[Thanks to Chau Wu]