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:
While restaurant hunting in the East Bay, I happened upon these dishes with the intriguing English names of "Mr and Mrs Smith" and "Boiled Omasum with Chili Pepper." Omasum turns out to be an obscure name of a variety of tripe, but I'm puzzled as to how the Smith family made it into Chinese cuisine.
I first heard about Beau Jessup (founder [2015] and CEO of Special Name) and her Chinese baby-naming business a couple of years ago. There was even a TEDx talk by her about it:
Newspaper articles describing the incident, which is now being referred to as the "'Mǎlìyà' shìjiàn「瑪麗亞」事件" ("'Maria' Affair"), may be found here (in Chinese, with video clip) and here (in English).
Mayor Han is notorious for his errant, flippant manner of speaking, but this instance — which he later claimed was a "joke" — quickly came back to haunt him. To understand why this is so, we need to take into account a number of factors.
I have a colleague at Penn who teaches medieval Arabic cultural history; his name is Paul Cobb. He used to teach at the University of Chicago.
I have a friend at the University of Chicago who teaches medieval Chinese cultural history; his name is Paul Copp. He received his PhD from nearby Princeton, which starts with a "P".
Boy, do I ever get them confused!
I mentioned this to Diana Shuheng Zhang, and she replied as follows:
Lately, since Xi Jinping made himself President for Life of the People's Republic of China, wags and wits have taken to calling the country over which he rules "Xina".
It turns out that this is the Catalan word for "China". Curious to know how Xina is pronounced in Catalan, I looked it up on Wiktionary:
Perhaps modeled on the rise of big brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, Crate & Barrel, etc. (though in our own history going back much further), but a bit different, in Asia, we have Nail & Nail, Lock & Lock, Bagel & Bagel, and so forth. Below are photographs of two shops in Asia with "X & X" names.
I should mention that the Chinese name of the first one is "rèlà shēnghuó 热辣生活" ("hot and spicy life").
I recently learnt that although Taipei たいぺい is generally used as the Japanese reading for Taipei 台北, NHK still uses the colonial form Taihoku たいほく. Is this still true in 2018? Why would the national broadcaster persist in using an archaic term? To me, it seems it would be comparable to the BBC insisting on using the name Ceylon to refer to Sri Lanka.
I asked several colleagues who are specialists on Japanese what the significance of this usage might be.
