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From: wing@pegasus.com (Wing Ng)
Subject: Re: Pronouncing your name in another language
Organization: Pegasus Information Systems
Message-ID: <D2w59q.24z@pegasus.com>
References: <J8yYBWU.padrote@delphi.com> <9501423.14645@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU> <rharmsen.138.00046F62@knoware.nl> <3fmken$abc@netaxs.com>
Date: Tue, 24 Jan 1995 03:49:02 GMT
Lines: 45

In article <3fmken$abc@netaxs.com>, jenster <jenster@netaxs.com> wrote:
>Ruud Harmsen (rharmsen@knoware.nl) wrote:
>
>: >[And as a brief aside, wasn't there someone a few years ago claiming that we
>: > had got it all wrong, and should still refer to Beijing as Peking?
>: > Interestingly enough, we still refer to Shanghai as Shanghai, at least
>: > here in Australia, or is that one of the new versions?]
>
>: Can someone clarify about this way to write Chinese? I heard that the 
>: distinction p-b ( and likewise t-d, k-g etc,etc) in Chinese is not 
>: voiced-voiceless, but aspirated-non aspirated. Yet I heard a Chinese say 
>: Beijing once with a sound that looked like a voiced b to my ears. There are 
>: many kinds of Chinese I suppose, does that explain it?
>
>No, I think the distinction is voiced-voiceless, since unvoiced sounds in 
>Mandarin (like p, t, k, etc.) are also, for the most part, unaspirated as 
>well.  You did hear correctly -- the initial sound in "Beijing" is a 
>voiced b.

Not correct, the distinction is asp. vs. unasp.  In both Mandarin
and Cantonese, the "b" is actually unasp. "p", i.e. it's voiceless.
In ancient Chinese, and in some dialects like Shanghainese, the
voiced "b" still exists.

Wing

>
>As someone explained elsewhere in the thread, "Shanghai" remains the same
>under the most widespread "old" system of Romanization (Wade-Giles), and
>the official Romanization system of the PRC (Pinyin, since 1979).  The
>difficulty in reading Wade-Giles is that what would appear in Pinyin as
>"bi" and "pi" respectively (omitting tone markings for simplicity's sake),
>would appear in Wade-Giles as "pi" and "p'i".  This could easily lead one
>to believe that the two initial sounds are both unvoiced, and that
>difference is one of aspiration.  The problem with Wade-Giles worsens 
>when one discovers that the apostrophes used to differentiate 
>voiced/unvoiced sounds are routinely dropped in all manner of documents.
>This is also why Taipei is spelled as it is, despite the fact that the 
>second syllable begins with a voiced, unaspirated sound.
>
>--Jennifer
>
>


