When inserting English word and arabic numbers into Chinese sentences

[Publius]

@Dawei3Yes, it involves changes in the sound system and the spelling convention, not a simple matter of mishearing. But your example is not an appropriate one. The current Japanese pronunciation for 北京 (Beijing) is indeed Pekin (ペキン), but as is suggested by the use of katakana, it's actually of European origin, probably French, dating no further back than the Qing dynasty. The on-yomi or Sino-Japanese "sound" reading of 北京 is Hokkyō. When read Hokkyō, it refers to 京都 Kyōto, the former imperial capital for over a thousand years (794-1868), located to the north of 奈良 Nara the oldest capital. 東京 Tōkyō the new capital of course is "eastern" relative to Kyōto, not in any way a reference to the Chinese Empire. I know some Japanese. Allow me to elaborate a bit.

 

As I mentioned previously, the reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciation for 北京 is roughly */pək.kiɐŋ/ or Bekgiang if one insists on using pinyin. The reconstruction work is based on multiple sources: the good old rime books, transliterations of Buddhist sutra, various Chinese dialects, non-Sinitic languages in close contact with and heavily influenced by Chinese such as Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese.

 

Faced with a massive influx of Chinese words, Japanese people had to find a way to deal with the novel sounds not found in their language, most notably the syllable-ending consonants -p, -t, -k and -m, -n, -ŋ. The plosives are easier. They just added a syllable with the "weakest" vowel so to speak, usually u or i. So 一 (MC */ʔit/, Yue jat1) became 'iti'; 六 (MC */liuk/, Yue luk6) became 'roku'; 十 (MC */dʑip/, Yue sap6) became 'zipu'. For the first two nasals -m and -n, they used -mu or -mi at first, but soon switched to -n following the invention of the last and very special kana ん/ン. (On a side note, two readings of the kanji 文, fumi (ふみ, 'epistle') and bun (ぶん, 'sentence'), could well be the same sound with different spellings.) As for the third nasal -ŋ, they did their best to emulate by adding a い or う to the preceding vowel. How it was originally pronounced, we have no idea; but apparently they were i and u respectively when they began to merge with the preceding vowel to form long vowels. (Japanese has a relatively simple syllable structure. Old Japanese had an even simpler one. All those 長音 (long vowel), 拗音 (consonant + glide + vowel), 促音 (double consonant), 撥音 (syllabic n) wouldn't exist if not for an effort to accommodate Chinese sounds.)

 

Today the most common reading for 京 in Japanese is kyō (きょう). The old spelling or historical kana usage, however, is kiyau (きやう). The きや combination was used to represent kya before the new spelling convention きゃ was established after the World War II. Meanwhile, a sound change happening in Japanese has caused the vowel combination a + u to merge into a single long vowel ō long before the modern spelling reform. So although spelled kiyau, it was pronounced kyō anyway. (Once a loanword was absorbed into the language, it became part of the language and subject to its internal sound changes; the original sound, though, is often preserved in the old spelling.) Since -u was meant to represent the Chinese -ŋ, 'kyau' matches perfectly with the supposed Middle Chinese pronunciation */kiɐŋ/.

 

Similarly the on-yomi of 東, tō < tou (とう, 漢音 or Sino-Japanese reading based on the pronunciation of the Tang dynasty) or tsū < tuu (つう, 呉音 or Sino-Japanese reading based on Wu dialect of the Northern and Southern dynasties), maps to the Middle Chinese pronunciation */tuŋ/. Armed with such knowledge, working backwards from Tōkyō, one can arrive at a pseudo-pinyin spelling of Donggiang. Compare Cantonese: Dung1ging1.

 

By the way, there is another, less common reading kei (けい) for 京. It was either a /keŋ/ re-borrowed into Japanese at a later time, or the same /kiɐŋ/ but spelled differently, because there was no central authority to regulate how a Chinese sound was spelled using Japanese kana.

 

Now let's turn to 北, Middle Chinese */pək/, Cantonese bak1, Japanese hoku (ほく). A little off, isn't it? Well, it has to do with the most radical sound change ever happened in Japanese, namely, to the は row.

 

はひふへほ are now pronounced ha, hi, fu, he, ho. But add a dakuten (濁点, voiced mark), they become ばびぶべぼ ba, bi, bu, be, bo. It just doesn't make sense -- unless the unmarked ones were originally pronounced pa, pi, pu, pe, po, which is exactly the case. The p sound in Japanese is very unstable. It went through ɸ, h, (w), (∅) -- meaning in some cases disappeared altogether. In the first Japanese dictionary compiled by Europeans, the Japanese-Portuguese Dictionary or 日葡辞書 published in 1603, the は row was transcribe as fa, fi, fu, fe, fo. And there's evidence to suggest that the sound change had already begun in the 10th century, not too long after katakana and hiragana were invented.

 

It's worth mentioning that the so-called handakuten (半濁点, semivoiced mark -- clearly a misnomer) was invented by the same Portuguese missionaries who compiled the dictionary. Before then, はひふへほ were pronounced either as fa, fi, fu, fe, fo when isolated or as (p)pa, (p)pi, (p)pu, (p)pe, (p)po when in double consonant position. (So this innovation seems a little bit unnecessary if we forget the fact that before the introduction of small っ in 1948, there was no reliable way for a non-native to tell whether a つ means double consonant or simply a normal tsu sound.) Now thanks to them, pa, pi, pu, pe, po are written differently with a small circle ぱぴぷぺぽ.

 

Back to fa, fi, fu, fe, fo. They later went on to become ha, hi, fu, he, ho when word-initial and wa, i, u, e, o in other positions. The latter group are also written as わいうえお after the spelling reform to reflect the real pronunciation, i.e., いふ 'to say' becomes いう -- a historical p just poof, disappeared without a trace. Exceptions were made for particles は and へ, because particles are such an integral part of the language and they have no kanji representation, changing them would risk rendering all existing documents unreadable. That's why if you want to type konnichiwa in Japanese, you need to actually type ko-nn-ni-chi-ha. (It's shortened from 今日は（御機嫌いかがですか？） 'As for today, (how are you feeling?)')

 

So modern Japanese hoku should correspond to a Middle Chinese /pok/. And hoku + kyō = hokkyō is because that's the correct Chinese way. Chinese -p, -t, -k are "unreleased", i.e. hold without burst, like the first t in the English word 'cattail'. The u sound in Japanese ([ɯ̟]) is already very weak, often devoiced to the point of near inaudible. When two plosives meet, it's quite easy for the the first to be assimilated into the second, producing a lengthened, single consonant. (This happened in other languages too, for example, Latin perfectus > Italian perfetto.) From a listener's point of view, it feels like the flow of sound is being clipped/cut off for a beat and then resumes. This "clipping off" is written in Japanese as っ. When converting to romaji, it means the consonant that follows must be doubled.

 

To summarize: Middle Chinese 北 */pək/ and 京 */kiɐŋ/ were borrowed into Japanese, went through mutilation and evolution, and give us the final product Hokkyō.

 

An interesting exercise: It is deducible from above, that from year 9xx to 16xx, p sound could not happen at the beginning of a Japanese word. In modern Japanese, anything beginning with a p must be a gairaigo (外来語) borrowed from European languages.

 

Also deducible is that until very recently, there was no h sound in Japanese. So what about the Chinese words with an h sound? The answer is: they used k, a plosive at about the same position, to represent the Chinese h, which is a fricative. Therefore 海 Middle Chinese */xɒi/ = Cantonese hoi2 = Japanese kai (かい). This mispronounced k also follows the Japanese double consonant rules, e.g., 北海道 = hoku + kai + dō = Hokkaidō (ほっかいどう). And that's about it.

 

[Dawei3]

@Publius  Thanks!  I did not know where the Japanese pronunciation of Beijing came from (Or why Tokyo was the Eastern capital).  Your note made me think about a Chinesepod lesson about Seoul that always puzzled me. 

 

In the lesson, they discussed the new and old Chinese pronunciation of Seoul.  They noted Seoul's "new name" in Chinese was 首尔 ("Shǒu'ěr) versus the previous 漢城 (Hànchéng ) .  However, the reason for the change puzzled me:  they said China was changing the name it used for Seoul so it was closer to Seoul's pronunciation in English.  Huh???  Why not pick a name closer to the Korean pronunciation? 

 

(That "p" was unstable in Japanese made me think of Germanic/Latin-Greek relationship of "P" and "f".  That Latin & Greek "p"s are generally "f"s in the Germanic languages.  i.e., pisces & fish, foot & pedal/podiatrist, etc.) 

 

[Lu]

11 hours ago, Dave1 said:

they said China was changing the name it used for Seoul so it was closer to Seoul's pronunciation in English.  Huh???  Why not pick a name closer to the Korean pronunciation?

The English pronunciation is pretty close to the Korean pronunciation. But if they explained it as 'closer to the English pronunciation', that is perhaps because English is the first and formost of all 外语 and thus for some people/in some cases, the benchmark for everything.

 

@Publius, thanks for that post, that was really interesting!

[DavyJonesLocker]

13 hours ago, Dave1 said:

However, the reason for the change puzzled me:  they said China was changing the name it used for Seoul so it was closer to Seoul's pronunciation in English.  Huh???  Why not pick a name closer to the Korean pronunciation? 

 

If you did it by that logic though, you would then be doing it for all the world's native languages. It wouldn't help Chinese or anyone really for that matter to dicepher what country or city one is referring to in Chinese (if it's just transliteration)

[Publius]

@LuIs it interesting interesting or British interesting?

[Michaelyus]

On 8/16/2018 at 5:58 PM, Dave1 said:

 They noted Seoul's "new name" in Chinese was 首尔 ("Shǒu'ěr) versus the previous 漢城 (Hànchéng ) .  However, the reason for the change puzzled me:  they said China was changing the name it used for Seoul so it was closer to Seoul's pronunciation in English.  Huh???  Why not pick a name closer to the Korean pronunciation? 

 

 

The request was actually made by the then-mayor of Seoul rather than by the Chinese side. It follows transcription of Mandarin into Korean, not English, asㅅ becomes Pinyin  sh (not s, which is mapped to ㅆ). I agree though the name in Korean is fairly close to the pronunciation in English (both American and British accents).

 

Also, the reason(s) were almost certainly different - making it more accessible for English speakers (in China going to Korea??) is unlikely to be one of them. The link of 漢 to China as opposed to Korea, plus the fact that there is both a Seoul University and a Hansung University (and a Hangyong University) which was always mixed up in Chinese website translation: these are more likely to have played a part.