送交者: Erxin 于 2006-2-10, 17:37:04:
The other day I was watching a travel program on TV. The host was a girl, native English speaker. When the green island of Taiwan shows up on the screen, the city Taipei was popping up. She clearly pronounced the city Taipei as "Tie-Pay", as opposed to Tie-Bay as wished or thought by many Chinese people.
This indeed appears very interesting to me. Back to the spelling Peking. If you show Peking to a native English speaker, do you hear "pee-king" or "bay-kin(g)" or "bekin(g)". It would be interesting to see what comes out.
What occurs myterious to me is that most, if not all of, Chinese words that start with sound "B" and in the moddle of a word were spelled as "P" instead of "B" in the old style Roman phonetic spelling. There must be some reason for that, but if there was, that reason must have become obviously obsolete.