Mucus from Hatrack/Sake wanted to post this but registering is taking time apparently.
Also, it's my understanding that the two different systems are based on different dialects. Correct me if I'm wrong, but Beijing is the name in Mandarin, while (I believe) Peking is from Cantonese.
That sounds like a plausible guess, but Cantonese would sound more like (sounding it out, don't know IPA) buc-ging which is certainly closer to Peking than Beijing but not quite. Wikipedia actually is of the opinion that Fujianese is closer by way of a different treaty port, Xiamen which predates Hong Kong. (Amoy in the later article)
Peking came from the old accepted system of romanizing Chinese words Wades/Giles
This is actually incorrect to my surprise, Beijing in Wade-Giles should actually be Peiching not Peking.
It's virtually a certainty that Peking will be dead in less than 50 years.
Aside from the Peking Duck example, another curious example is that Peking University despite being in Beijing itself and administered by the state has the official policy of using 'Peking University' as its name for English-language materials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_UniversityAnyways, there is also this blast from the past summary:
Instead, we find people from Canton
saying Pakking, people from Meihsien saying Petkin, people from Amoy saying Pokking, people
from Swatow saying Pakkiii, people from Fuchow saying Pceyqking, and people from Shanghai
and Suchow saying Paqchin. It is curious that all of these pronunciations resemble our Peking
more than they do MSM Beijing. In truth, this is no mere accident or manifestation of backward
vulgarity. It is due, on the contrary, to a pattern of linguistic evolution that can be described and
dated fairly accurately.
http://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp0...ing_beijing.pdfA more modern article gives this helpful summary as well as a lot of other good thought
To summarize, the variation in the form of the name of the capital of China arises from three different sources:
* different underlying names
* different pronounciations in different dialects of Chinese
* different romanizations of the same pronounciation of the same name
The combinations that you are likely to run into are the following:
Beijing
is what you get if you use the Pinyin romanization for the Mandarin pronounciation of the current official name.
Peking
is what you get if you use the old postal system romanization, which was based either on the pronounciation in a Southern dialect or an archaic pronounciation in Mandarin of the current official name.
Peip'ing
is what you get if you use the Wade-Giles romanization of the Mandarin pronounciation of the Nationalist name.
Peiping
is what you get if you use the Wade-Giles romanization of the Mandarin pronounciation of the Nationalist name but drop the apostrophe.
Beiping
is what you get if you use the Pinyin romanization of the Mandarin pronounciation of the Nationalist name.
Yenching
is what you get if you use the Wade-Giles romanization of the Mandarin pronounciation of the old literary name.
Yenjing
is what you get if you use a Pinyin-style folk romanization of the Mandarin pronounciation of the old literary name. This isn't the true Pinyin romanization, which would be Yanjing. I've never seen that outside of China except in scholarly contexts.
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog...ves/000583.htmlAlso, in the article itself I think they refer to Yanjing beer as being the most popular which I think is false being outpaced by Tsingtao beer (for good reason IMHO).
