Capital (京)

[Ian_Lee]

Does any poster find some common grounds in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages related to the capital?

When they speak of going to Beijing/Seoul/Tokyo, they all talk of going up to the capital no matter where they are in the country.

No matter you are in Hong Kong or Harbin, usually the Chinese there will just say 上京

And also no matter the Koreans are in Cheju or by the Yalu River (I mean in the Chosun Dynasty), when they spoke/speak of going to Seoul (서울), they use the verb 올라가다 (going up to).

And the Japanese also sometimes use the Kanji phrase 上京 when they speak of going to Tokyo even they reside in Hokkaido.

(But it seems people in Taiwan don't use the verb 上 when they mean they go to Taipei.)

It sounds somehow feudalistic since the Americans don't say they go up to Washington D.C.!

And interestingly the Koreans call their capital district as Kyonggi-Do (京畿道).

So there is 東京 in Japan (actually it wasn't named so until Emperor Meiji moved the capital from Kyoto to Edo in the mid-19th Century) and 南京 and 北京 in China, but is there any place in China also called 東京?

In fact it had ben.

In Northern Song Dynasty, the capital Kaifeng was also known as 東京

[liuzhou]

I'm not sure that the phenonenom is peculiar to Asian languages. I have often heard people in England saying they are going up to London.

[Claw]

It sounds somehow feudalistic since the Americans don't say they go up to Washington D.C.!

You can hear it being said in America too... I've heard (and have said myself) "I'm going up to D.C."

...though it doesn't apply just to capitals. It can work with other cities as well, i.e. "I'm going up to New York."