Here in Utah, KSL's newscasters (our NBC station) keep calling the olympic city 'Bay-Jing' with a hard J sound. Now, this may be a lame post but it kinda bugged me since I had never heard it pronounced that way, always a soft 'zh' sound for the j. Apparently it was bugging a lot of people and it became sort of a debate among viewers of ksl and I noticed it was a sidebar link on their main page. After clicking on it, I noticed they also had a youtube.com link on the story that clears up any confusion. It's a cute, funny, good video you should watch. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GE4dkpOdPw
I also agree with ksl's author of the editorial. Here is the quote from the end of the article:
"But, we wouldn’t use the foreign pronunciation of all places, would we? When the World Cup was in Germany we weren’t calling it “Deutschland.” We don’t call Japan “Nippon,” and we don’t call Norway “Norge,” do we?
However, I can see why the people living in a certain city would insist that you say the name of that city correctly. We do it here in Utah. Every time you say the name of the lovely city of Hurricane, the locals insist you call it Hurri-cun. They actually correct you, “No, no. It’s pronounced Hurri-cun.” But, everyone else in the English speaking world would probably argue, “No, it’s pronounced Hurri-CANE. I’ve heard it many times on the news. Hurri-CANE.”
“Hurri-cun!”
“Hurri-cane!”
“Hurri-cun!”
“Hurri-cane!”
And, so on.
So, for anyone who gets bothered with how we pronounce Beijing, keep in mind, we’re not doing it to get on your nerves. Just be glad that the Olympics are not being held south of our U.S. border, otherwise we’d be saying “May-he-co” in our fake Spanish accents.