On Beizzhing v. Bay-Jing oddsmaking and how English speakers are finally going to pronounce the name of this city anyway
By this time you’ve heard from their mothers and their aunts. You might as well admit it: you’re addicted. You’ve been watching the human interest pieces, lapping up the sappy music, the soft lighting, the black-and-white photos… You feel like you know both competitors intimately. Maybe you’ve even put aside your initial biases and followed the example of Beijing Sounds, which months ago declared a likely winner but in the same breath declared editorial disinterest.
On the one hand you’ve got Bay-Jing*, anointed as rightful winner by a breathtakingly elite alliance. The educators, anxious for their pupils to appear worldly, cringe at the thought of a Beizzhing win. They argue for the rightful crowning of Bay-Jing using words like “proper” and “correct.” The Zhonglish speakers, mostly less truculent, root for Bay-jing out of simple convenience. The anti-French crowd sees Bay-Jing as a crisp, clean cut Anglo-Saxon pronunciation that avoids paying inadvertent homage to the influence of that language from across the Channel.
On the other hand there is, as the first camp variously sees it, the French-mimicking, foreign-language-ignorant, English-orthography-defying Beizzhing. “Oh, the disrespect! The grotesque weakness! The depths of ignorance! That this ‘Beizzhing’ has even survived to make it to the Olympics is an abomination.”
Beizzhing has no real sponsors, no BBC Pronunciation Unit rooting for it. No training in exotic locales for this competitor. Beizzhing is fueled by spaghetti and meatballs with the occasional Orange Chicken, and there’s no doubt that it flew coach on the way over.
And yet, there it is. Loud and clear enough for NPR to snipe and sniff for 44 seconds:
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Ah and even worse, notes Anthony Kuhn: IT’S AN AMERICANISM! What better way to dis this unwanted competitor and hope he slinks off the field and goes back to Richfield, MN or wherever he came from.
Except that it’s not, as should be readily apparent from the fact that the BBC pronunciation unit really did have to pull out the big guns to get their correspondents on track.
And it’s also not Jing. At least not like she says it. This column’s word count limitations prevent a full explanation, but suffice it to say that the Mandarin sound represented by J is not the same as J as in Juice. See this piece from Sinosplice for a good intro.
Was NPR right, at least, about the NBC pronunciation? To be honest, with the Beijing Sounds studios currently lacking a TV, I feel a little hesitant to answer. But for an unscientific tally, here’s what the NBC website had to offer on the first four instances I could find Beijing mentioned by a newscaster:
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Yep, Beizzhing four for four, and a non-American in the group for good measure.
Bay-jingers may still be hoping for a Beijing miracle. Everyone’s entitled to their Olympic dreams. And I gotta admit: if there’s anywhere that I might have thought Bay-jing still had some kind of hope, it would have been here at these Olympics with the extraordinary opportunity for gajillions to hear Bay-Jing drilled into their heads for two weeks. Language acquires enormous inertia, but maybe there would be enough force to cause a change in direction — so I reasoned.
Alas, NBC, the last best hope of Bay-jing-kind appears to have ordered an extra cup of Jīn Liù Fú on the way to that BBC pronunciation class.
[Update Aug 17, 2008: Apparently this race is playing to a sold out crowd. Here are the partisans and punters I'm aware of:
- Language log: here and here recently, not to mention others
- The Word
- AP writer David Bauder (h/t to Language Log)
- LanguageHat (quite a while ago)
- Linguism here and here (aside from the reference in the article above)
Oh, and I almost forgot, no list would be complete without the two didactic Chinese characters:
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* In the highly scientific world of Beijing Sounds orthography, Bay-Jing = [beɪdʒɪŋ] and Beizzhing = [beɪʒɪŋ]
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Comments 3
Hahaha! I love it. I want to see a medals table for the two pronunciations.
And yes, the pinyin “j” ain’t exactly the English juicy “j” (that’s more like the pinyin “zh”) but for Westerners it’s close enough right?
Brilliant post.
Posted 17 Aug 2008 at 5:19 pm ¶Albert, you probably saw this, but just after you commented Language Log came out with this comment on the Beijing/Beizhing thing.
Their point isn’t entirely clear except to those who already have an ear for Mandarin, but the gist of it is that the J sounds are just not the same and we should all stop getting our undies in a knot about it.
Posted 27 Aug 2008 at 6:24 pm ¶Fantastic post.
I’ve noticed that my mother pronounces Nanjing as Nayzzhing. I’m not sure if this is another “Americanism”, or another facet of my mom’s bizarre use of the English language (she also says sandwiches “samerchez” and “Dunkin’s Donut”).
Posted 01 Sep 2008 at 4:45 am ¶Post a Comment