@Pinyin.info — your article is a great exposition on Shaanxi and I’m embarrassed to say that I hadn’t even checked on your site, so I can’t blame Google for not indexing. Regarding Pinyin dabblers’ persistent inability to use diacritics, even where they’re desperately needed, can’t you just hear YR Chao chuckling about the virtues of his system? Sure you don’t want to change to gwoyeuromatzyh.info?

@Kellen, there’s probably plenty of roujiamo in Beijing. The problem goes back to the YU kitchen, which is so consistently piled with tasty fare that I rarely get to peruse the small eateries that would be sure to have it.

@Randy — and even more embarrassing, I hadn’t even considered that Wikipedia would have an entry. I’m curious about its assertion without comment that the pronunciation is biang2. As I noted in the recording above, YU pretty clearly used tone 1 — and she lived in the area for 10 years. PBS made it tone 4, but that doesn’t count for much since I doubt she’d ever heard it before. Should have recorded more…

I see there is a traditional character version as well. And WP has it as biáng. The mnemonic they give is interesting too.