Old US person here, we used to call it Peking too. I think (haven’t looked it up, but it was what I was told at the time we changed it) it’s a less-accurate version from Westerners who didn’t really listen or asked the wrong person, and Beijing is closer to how the people who live there pronounce it.
Westerners who didn’t really listen or asked the wrong person
Or it was simply the best attempt at the time! Idk if you’ve ever tried to transcribe even your own words phonetically (where you know what sounds you’re enunciating) or tried to guess the spelling (much simpler than phonetics) for a new-to-you word in a foreign language even if you understand the language nearly as well (just don’t have the vocab yet) as a native speaker. It’s really super hard to find letters for sounds!
There’s people whose job is nothing but finding and arguing over the most accurate transcription, e.g. for dictionaries or research, of languages that long have a dictionary, pronunciation guides, learning materials, etc., but are wrong a decent fraction of the time.
Or when they’re not wrong, they’re getting outdated with evolving speech, e.g. “train” has shifted to something like “tchrain” but Merriam Webster claims the transcription is trān while their example pronunciation sounds out [tʒreˑjnə] (loosely: tchraaine) if you listen closely and compare to IPA charts (compare with their entry for “chart”, where they show the ch in the transcription but not the initial t! That looks to me like shart! lol)
We might need to give the olden times phoneticians more credit than this 😄. Of course I wasn’t there for it either but I was triggered by what sounds like a dismissive default assumption about people not doing their job properly while in reality we usually all try our best 🙂
Old US person here, we used to call it Peking too. I think (haven’t looked it up, but it was what I was told at the time we changed it) it’s a less-accurate version from Westerners who didn’t really listen or asked the wrong person, and Beijing is closer to how the people who live there pronounce it.
Or it was simply the best attempt at the time! Idk if you’ve ever tried to transcribe even your own words phonetically (where you know what sounds you’re enunciating) or tried to guess the spelling (much simpler than phonetics) for a new-to-you word in a foreign language even if you understand the language nearly as well (just don’t have the vocab yet) as a native speaker. It’s really super hard to find letters for sounds!
There’s people whose job is nothing but finding and arguing over the most accurate transcription, e.g. for dictionaries or research, of languages that long have a dictionary, pronunciation guides, learning materials, etc., but are wrong a decent fraction of the time.
Or when they’re not wrong, they’re getting outdated with evolving speech, e.g. “train” has shifted to something like “tchrain” but Merriam Webster claims the transcription is trān while their example pronunciation sounds out [tʒreˑjnə] (loosely: tchraaine) if you listen closely and compare to IPA charts (compare with their entry for “chart”, where they show the ch in the transcription but not the initial t! That looks to me like shart! lol)
We might need to give the olden times phoneticians more credit than this 😄. Of course I wasn’t there for it either but I was triggered by what sounds like a dismissive default assumption about people not doing their job properly while in reality we usually all try our best 🙂