It bugs me when Americans ignorantly butcher the pronunciation of foreign place names by Americanizing them. (I probably do it now and then too, but I try to be aware of pronunciation).
Everyone does that with place names and personal names, in cases where:
- The speaker's language simply doesn't have the same phonemes as the original. E.g, Göte, Dvořák;
- The original language presents consonant combinations to which the speaker is unaccustomed. E.g, Plzeñ, Hranice (yes, I'm picking on my mother's language a lot but there's probably no language with more difficult phonetics for anglophones than Czech); or
- Transcribing foreign writing into the Roman alphabet is misleading and/or ambiguous, e.g...
One common mispronunciation that annoys me is that of Beijing. Most westerners say the "j" like it's french, like "beige" (the color) with an "ing" after, when it should be pronounced as a hard "dzh" sound as in "jail."
My third example. Mandarin J is not English J. Mandarin has no voiced stops or affricates. The English paradigm of voiced/voiceless consonants does not match the Mandarin paradigm of aspirated/unaspirated. The consonants in judge, ads, big are voiced, whereas the consonants in church, eats, pick are voiceless. In Mandarin the consonants in
ping, cha, cai (pronounced tsai),
qi (pronounced chi) are voiceless and aspirated, whereas the consonants in
bing, zha (pronounced ja, more or less),
zai (pronounced dzai, more or less),
ji are voiceless and unaspirated.
So the J in
bei jing (northern capital) is not the J in jingle. It's voiceless. It's hard to describe because it never occurs in English. If you consider that Mandarin T and D are like the T in English top and mistake, respectively, that gives you a clue to Mandarin J. But most English speakers are not conscious of that difference. Hang a piece of tissue in front of your mouth while you say top and mistake; in the first word a puff of air after the T will blow the tissue out, but in the second word it will not.
The Q in
qing is an aspirated CH, a phoneme we also don't have in English. Try saying cheese with that little puff of air after the CH.
This is why the old Wade-Giles transliteration system had those apostrophes and no voiced consonants. In
p'ei, ch'a, ts'ai they want you to put in the puff of air, whereas in
pei, cha, tsai they want you to use voiceless consonants but leave out the puff of air.
Nonetheless the American newscaster pronunciation of Beijing grates on my ears too, even though a Chinese would understand it and probably not think it's any worse than the "proper" English way, with a voiced J, because they're both wrong.
