Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

On Aug 21, 2008, at 11:06 AM, Lars Finsen wrote:

> Den 21. aug. 2008 kl. 17.19 skreiv R A Brown:
>> Nor is it true that anglophones give pronunciation based _English_
>> rules. The most common pronunciation of Beijing that I hear on the
>> British media pronounces the medial _j_ as [Z] - and judging by
>> one email I read in this thread, this is not unknown on the other
>> side of the Pond. These people are giving the _j_ the *French*
>> pronunciation because "It's a _foreign_ word, in'it?"
>
> Yeah, right. That's the English pronunciation I've heard most
> often, too. I guess that's what we call hypercorrection in
> linguistics.
I found a post on Language Log saying that there is quite a bit of
medial consonant lenition in spoken Mandarin, but unfortunately it
doesn't mention at all whether the <j> is ever pronounced as a
fricative.

< http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=502 >

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