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"Peking" is Wade-Giles system, Beijing is Standard Pinyin system.

Wades-Giles sometimes provide a more accurate pronunciation guide to a foreign trying to pronounce Chinese, but spelling-wise it is duanting to figure it, like 'Tsim Sha Tsui" - one has to figure out how to prounce 'Ts'; the Pinyin system tends to do away with a lot of the subtler nuances but gives a more standard pronunciation, whether it is phoentically 'zh' or 'j'. It is accepted that the mandarin dialect of Bejing as the standard mandarin, so the phonetic sound is closer to 'J'. We are from the south, and as Mydnight once pointed out, the northers and southerners have different phonetic sounds for mandarin, we tend to pronounce it as 'ZH'.

The Chinese have a phonetic system before the arrival of Pinyin in the 1970s (I think it was 1973, I remembered one year we learnt the old system, the next we had to start again with the pinyin system), it was more complex system, but attuned to subtle nunaces.

Danny

The sites I use are Babelfish, Mandarintools, Zhongwen. The one I use quite a bit is Unicode.org. You'll need some software to spit out the

4 digit hex codes. But it does give additional textual uses of the character. I frequent TaoBao and Ebay using Google translation and when I see something interesting in English I'll look at it in the Chinese and strip off the Unicode. You'll see the occasional blah-blah tea reprocessing factory where I strip the Unicode and save with the picture. NTFS on Windows 2000 doesn't have any trouble saving the Unicode as part of the file name. I'm up to about ten puerh factories with the Chinese and English equivalents with the picture of a wrapper.

Jim

sherdwen wrote:

sorry but it is not Wade-Giles. Wade-Giles is for the pronunciation in Mandarin and the name of the capital in this transliteration system is "Pei-ching". The word "Peking" used in English derives from some southern dialect (Fukienese or Cantonese) that preserve the velar "ki", not existing in Mandarin.

I agree that Wade-Giles has a more immediate rading for a foreigner, but the example quoted ('Tsim Sha Tsui") again is not Wade-Giles.

Pinyin was approved by the autorities in 1958 and since then teached at school and adopted in the transliteration of printed matters titles, personal names and so on. With the cultural revolution this first experimantal fase came to an end. It was indeed only at the beginning of the

70s and the reinstauration of diplomatic relations that Pinyin was boosted again. Finally in 1979 a resolution of ONU estabilshed Pinyin as the standard translitaration system for Chinese names. Pinyin reals suck from the point of view of sounds' description, it doesn't show clearly the realtions between some of them (it is difficult to understand that "hui" and "wei" were basically the same sound, one aspirated and the other not) and it mutilated some sounds of old Beijinghua (non distinction between "tENG" and "fENG"; no more "*yai" in "*Xuanyai"). In anycase, once you have learnt how to use it, it becames a very efficent method to fix the pronunciation of Chinese characters, and, most important, whether you like it or not, it is now the standard adopted by almost everyone.

Livio

Fantastic Livio,

You've explained it so much better than I can!

Danny