J---->K shift in Mandarin?

[Yihui]

Does anyone know about how or why a bunch of k sounds systematically changed to j in Mandarin?

It seems pretty obvious there was such a change from looking at historical names, like:

Peking->Beijing

Nanking->Nanjing

Heilungkiang->Heilongjiang

Kiangsi->Jiangxi

and so on

It seems even more obvious to me, as a Cantonese speaker, when most of these j sounds in Mandarin are pronounced with a g or k sound in my own dialect (ie Chiang Kaishek--> Jiang Jieshi) How did this change come about? Was it part of the standardization of Mandarin in the 20th century?

[perjp]

These are just different romanizations, and don't imply any sound change. Most of them (all?) are from the old postal system romanization, which wasn't really design to aproximate the real sound of Mandarin.

[Claw]

More of postal system pinyin here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_System_Pinyin

[ala]

East Asian languages (including Korean and Japanese) have progressively shifted from "hard" sounds to "soft" (Indo-European languages have undergone similar shifts). By that I mean from unaspirated plosives, to aspirated plosives, to affricates and fricatives, and finally to semivowels. p became p' which became pf and eventually became f or h; t became t' and some eventually became ts (pinyin z)and ts' (pinyin c); k became k' and some became h or gluttural [x]. Ever wondered why Philosophy is spelled with a "ph"? Because in ancient Greek it was actually at one point pronounced like pinyin p today.

A further step occurred in the northern dialects in the last 500 years or so, most syllables having an "i" medial had their consonants palatalized in Mandarin and Northern Wu dialects. k --> tc, (pinyin j); k' --> tc,' (pinyin q); h --> c, (pinyin x). So all the hard k's, g's, etc became "soft" when followed by an "i". This is much like the soft/hard "g" in French/Latin and to some extent in English, ginger vs. guest; or "ch" like children vs. cholera (children and the "kinder" in kindergarten are originally the same Germanic word).

Likewise, in Japanese you have tu --> tsu, du --> zu, p --> h/f, ts --> s. Palatalizations of si --> shi, zi --> ji, ti --> chi. But Japanese has retained ki, gi pronunciations. In Korean there was no shift to h and f; so Korean still today pronounces France and Fuji with a P.

Wu dialects shifted along with Mandarin, but with addition of voiced shifts b --> v; g --> ng --> nj --> j

Palatalizations of gi --> dZi; zi --> Zi; si,hi --> Si; tsi,ki --> tSi; ts'i,k'i --> tS'i, n --> nj.

So 新闻 is Shinven in Shanghainese today, instead of Sinben; Buddhism 佛 is Vut instead of But.

In some cases Wu dialects became "softer" than even Mandarin, such as 鬼 (Pinyin: gui3) is pronounced in Wu dialects like Pinyin "ju".

So a scale of the number of consonant shifts: Mandarin (most), Wu, Japanese, Cantonese, Korean (least).