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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keenath" data-source="post: 4102983" data-attributes="member: 59792">Actually that's more an artifact of the chinese accent, where P and B are virtually the same letter (the only difference even in English is only whether you "puff" the letter -- which is called a 'plosive' in linguist circles); similarly R and L are the same sound (somewhere halfway between the two, actually).  The J is actually a hard-j (as in "jelly"), not the soft-j that most people pronounce (as in "beige"), and in the chinese rising-tone it really does sound like a K if you aren't listening carefully.  (Actually, most english speakers use the wrong J sound when they see 'beijing', so one could argue that the K would get a closer approximation out of most people!)In any case, the transliteration of asian langauges is always difficult because they use a number of sounds we don't have in english -- It's few Americans or Europeans who can properly say the common Vietnamese last name, "Nguyen".So Beijing is less an effect of french people or the english tongue, and more just trying to pronounce sounds you never heard as a baby.  Your brain's language center actually dumps the ability to detect sounds that aren't used in the language(s) you learn when you're under 5 years old -- you hear them, but your language center doesn't process them as particles of speech, so learning to reproduce them is difficult -- and more akin to learning to sing than learning a new word (that is, it activates a different area of the brain).  This fact is why people who speak english as a second language will never lose their accent (or not without a long and difficult speech therapy process); their brain simply doesn't recognize some of the sounds.Eh.  Vowel shifting is the most common way for a language to evolve over time.  Between 1200 and 1600, english traded almost all of its vowels to other sounds, going from the standard latinate vowels (a=ah, e=eh, i=ee, o=oh, u=oo) to the bizarre current system where various vowels sound different in different situations.  (In latin, if you want one of the other sounds, you combine two of the basic vowels -- the long I, as in "strike", would be 'ai', for example, rather than shown by adding a silent-e. "Straik".  And nobody would say "strayk", because we'd never have heard of using long-vowel sounds when a vowel is followed by another vowel.)For that matter, the California "valley" accent and the "Southern" accent are the result of vowel shifts.Heh, yeah, sorry.  I've always had an interest in etymology (that is, where words come from), and pronunciation is part of that.I'm pretty sure it should actually be pronounced with a short-e at the beginning, and the accent on the first syllable -- "EL-ah-drin" -- where the last syllable  rhymes with "fin".</blockquote>

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