Relaxed schreef:Net op het nieuws.. Op het kaartje staat Beijing, ze zei Peking.. Ik denk huh? Ff Google, is dat hetzelfde! Habe ich nicht gewust
Zo kwam ik er laatst achter dat Spitsbergen en Svalbard dezelfde plek zijn.
Ik vond dit stukje over Peking / Beijing en vond het wel informatief:
Citaat:
The capital of China is called 北京.
For Chinese, 北 means north and 京 means capital. Peking and Beijing are approximations to the sounds Chinese use to pronounce these two characters.
Modern Chinese distinguish between P and B very differently to Latin or English, and there was no use of P and B in ancient China. Peking is what some Europeans thought they were hearing based on accents from the south of China, where 北= Pe and 京=king. That name stuck in many languages, with Pekin being a variant in others.
Much later, several systems were developed to convert characters into Latin letters, such as Wades-Giles, but use of "Peking" significantly predates that system. In the 1950's, the Chinese decided on a precise system of transliteration which is called pinyin, which is independent of the pronunciation systems in other languages and it makes computer systems workable in Chinese. Under this new system, 北=bei and 京=jing, and all characters pronounced 北 (such as 被, 倍, 杯, 背, 悲, 备, 碑 and 贝) are written as "bei". This as a good system, so most countries and people sensibly followed it, but not all.