Throughout the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and for some years afterwards, the Square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace was frequently mentioned in the news.

Then at the time of the student democracy protests in 1989, with no explanation that I can remember, we were told that they were concentrated in Tiananmen Square (which most people had great difficulty in pronouncing). It was only some time later that I realized that these two names referred to the same place (I know nothing of Chinese apart from how to anglicize its pronunciation).

The New China News Agency had already decided that from January 1979 all Chinese names would henceforth be reported by them in their Pinyin spellings, and this has gradually filtered through to all English news reports, although in 1989 we were still hearing about Peking rather than Beijing, but this doesn’t seem to me a reason for a translation of a place name to be abandoned in favour of an incomprehensible Chinese name. Could it have had anything to do with the contradiction between its name and the actions of the Chinese government?

For the record, Tiananmen has three syllables, and is most accurately anglicized as /’tjɛn æn mən/ with all four nasals clearly articulated.

John Wells’ blog today mentions the pronunciation of Beijing, and the BBC Pronunciation Unit’s recommendation to pronounce the -j- in the same way as in the English word ‘jingle’. He wonders how many people will heed the advice (and it’s what he gives in the Longman English Pronunciation Dictionary as well). From my experience, not many.

The New China News Agency (NCNA) decided back in the 1970s that from 1 January 1979, the only romanized spellings they would use for all Chinese names were the Pinyin ones. This meant that the capital city became Beijing, rather than whatever it might be in the various languages the NCNA put copy out in. For English-language newspapers and broadcasters, this left a problem: did they follow suit, and adopt Pinyin spellings (and so pronunciations) for all Chinese names, or did they continue to use the versions that had been current up to then, only using Pinyin for those people and places that were unfamiliar, or had no regular European spellings? Some names did not change, of course, such as the name of the Ming dynasty, but many others acquired very unfamiliar spellings: the Ching dynasty became Qing, and the early Communist leaders changed from Mao Tse Tung and Chou En Lai to Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Indexing became a problem as well: did you continue to look under C for the Ching dynasty, or only under Q, or should you cross reference everything, thus increasing the length of the index by a good deal?

Some publishers appeared to be completely bemused – I remember an article in the Times which used both Peking and Beijing in consecutive paragraphs. Many readers must have wondered whether the writer was talking about two different places. The BBC eventually canvassed the views of many of its journalists as to whether the”old” name, Peking, should be used, or the “new” one, Beijing. The correspondent in the Chinese capital at the time thought Peking should be maintained. No one asked me, but had they, I should have agreed with him: the words “old” and “new” were inappropriate in this context. The Chinese had not changed the name of the capital, which might have justified our changing it (as happened with Cambodia changing to Khmer Republic and then Kampuchea, before reverting to Cambodia), but had simply changed their romanization. However, his views were over-ridden, and the BBC has said Beijing ever since. Unfortunately, it has not – apart from the Radio 4 newsreaders (and not all of them!) and newsreaders on other networks (Radios 2 & 3 and World Service principally), most BBC broadcasters persist in using the palato-alveolar fricative (see my post ‘Fricative or Affricate’, and also John Maidment’s blog recently on Chinese alveolo-palatals). Notable exceptions have been every single one of the BBC’s correspondents stationed in Beijing, most recently James Reynolds. If they can learn, I see no reason why the rest of the Corporation’s staff can’t take the trouble to check with the pronunciation database and follow its advice.

Lilli Lee asks if we can still order Peking Duck, or whether we now have to ask for Beijing Duck. Some names are fixed, and regardless of other changes in the language, they remain. Strangely, this has happened three times with phrases containing the word duck: we can still order Peking Duck and Bombay Duck (not Mumbai Duck), and the species of duck known as the Muscovy Duck has not changed its name to Moscow Duck.

The Bombay Stock Exchange has not changed its name either, and I don’t see any suggestion that the Indian film industry should become known as Mollywood instead of Bollywood.

We now travel to Livorno instead of Leghorn, but leghorn is still a breed of chicken, and a type of straw hat.

A letter in the Independent newspaper last week (Wednesday 21 November), from Shirin Tata of London, explained the spelling and pronunciation of Peking as ‘a close approximation to the Cantonese name for the city (”puck-ing” with a hard “p”)’. This came about, the writer says, because early contacts between Europe and China were with traders and seamen from the south of China, and the Europeans copied their pronunciation for place names. This explanation is similar to that for the origin of the English name for Livorno in Italy: Leghorn (now obsolete), which is a close approximation to the local dialectal form for the name: Ligorno.

However, I have a different explanation for Peking: some of the earliest European travellers to China were Jesuit priests – the first dictionary of Chinese for Europeans was written by Jesuits – and as these would mainly be from southern European countries and speaking Romance languages, they would have transcribed what they heard in terms of their own languages, whether French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. In all these languages, the voiceless plosives (/p. t. k/) are unaspirated, unlike the English equivalents. As the initial consonant of the Mandarin name for Peking is also unaspirated, the priests will have written down a ‘p’. The following vowel (or diphthong) is, or at least starts as, a half close front vowel, and the spelling convention for this in all the Western Romance languages is ‘e’ (or ‘é’ in French). The next consonant is also unaspirated, but pronounced in the palatal area, auditorily closest to the sound represented in European languages by a ‘k’ when it occurs before a front vowel, as in this case. The final velar nasal is a sound that occurs only allophonically in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, so again, the nearest sound was used: [n]. This gives us the French version of the name Pékin, borrowed into English (the spelling ‘Pekin’ was common at one time).

I find this more satisfactory as an explanation than that of Shirin Tata, as it accounts for the initial ‘p’ in the English – and general European – spelling. Both the Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations have what Shirin describes as a ‘hard’ p – in other words, an unaspirated sound, which is far more similar to English /b/ than it is to English /p/.