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Peking is the Cantonese word for Beijing
by onethought 4y ago
Peking is the Cantonese word for Beijing
- gwd 4y agoNB this works both ways on a lot of things. For instance, the Chinese word for "guitar" is 吉他; pronounced "jí tā" in Mandarin, but "gat1 taa1" in Cantonese. Similary for "Canada" (加拿大): jiā ná dà in Mandarin, and gaa1 naa4 daai6 in Cantonese. It's a weird side-effect of two facts: 1) the British interacted a lot more directly with Canton than the rest of China 2) Mandarin and Cantonese are "officially" different dialects of the same language, so once you define the characters in one, you've mostly defined them in the other. (Some exceptions seem to include "bus" and "taxi", which in HK are obviously based on the English words, but Mandarin has their own, self-describing names for.)
- odiroot 4y agoAnd then you also have Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew. Spending some time in Malaysia and Singapore, you can hear all of these (plus Malay) mixed into a single English-language sentence. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the colonial language migrated back with the Brits.
- jhanschoo 4y agoNo, Bak-ging is the Cantonese word for Beijing under Yale, Jyutping, Pinyin. Please verify before passing something easily verifiable as fact.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- onethought 4y agoI clarified exactly what I meant: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33870873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33870873 and further here: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33875370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33875370
- jhanschoo 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33875094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33875094 Can you see my sourced cousin comment?