Re: Beijing, Zhongguo, etc.

IMO it has more to do with imposing artificial ideas of what the Anglophones
in question _think_ is the likely stress pattern of the source language,
default à la française. Hi'roshima is obviously an Anglicised stress pattern
(the latinate penult), as is 'Tokyo.
As a native Mandarin speaker, when pronouncing Chinese place names in
English my default is to destress it entirely, or to adopt the preferred
pattern of my conversation partner. I find the habit of many people to
pronounce English perfectly then suddenly say "Beijing" exactly as in
Mandarin rather disconcerting, particularly on the news networks.

On Tue, Aug 19, 2008 at 7:38 PM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:

> I don't think it's the syllable/morpheme ratio,  but the lack of
> stress in the source lang.  Even there it's not consistent: 'Szechuan
> vs Bei'jing vs 'Tai'pei.  'Tokyo, Hiro'shima or Hi'roshima,  etc.
>
>
>
> On 8/19/08, Eric Christopherson <rakko@...> wrote:
> > On Aug 18, 2008, at 2:44 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> >
> >> Hi!
> >>
> >> Mark J. Reed writes:
> >>> To go back to the subject in the header for a second - am I correct
> >>> that at the time of the creation of the romanization "Peking", the
> >>> name was actually pronounced [pe'k_jiN], but then the
> >>> diphthongalization and palatalization went further and now we have
> >>> [pej'ts\iN] ?
> >>
> >> I forgot to mention: the stress on the second syllable is probably due
> >> to misinterpretation of the Mandarin tones.  Both syllables are
> >> stressed in Mandarin, but higher pitch on the second might indicate
> >> stress to speakers of whatever other language.
> >
> > In English at least it seems to be very common to stress the last
> > syllable of names taken from Chinese and other languages will mostly
> > monosyllabic morphemes. To me it feels like each syllable is
> > perceived as a separate word for purposes of stress, and I think
> > often the last word in a multi-word name is stressed. (It definitely
> > feels that way if the syllables have hyphens between them.)
> >
>
> --
> Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com
>
> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
>

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