The problem with pushing English speakers to use special characters to reflect accuracy of endonyms is that it’s actually quite Eurocentric and gets absurd real quick.

China mandated a change from “Peking” to “Beijing”, but what they didn’t push for was to reflect the complete Mandarin endonym of the city.

Because if they did, we’d be referring to Beijing as “Běijīng”.

That doesn’t even do the endonym justice because the “B” and “J” in Mandarin for “Beijing” is different from how English speakers pronounce it. In Pinyin, the “b” is voiceless and unaspirated. And the actual “j” is much closer to the hard, sharp English “j” in jeep or jingle.

But when you realize that Mandarin is a tonal language, and it takes some time for an English speaker to differentiate between them—“Běijīng” doesn’t even do the endonym justice if you’re unaware that the characters indicate tones.

And why the hell are we using Roman characters anyway? Even Pinyin isn’t an accurate representation. Of course, actual Chinese people refer to Beijing as “北京”. And the literal meaning is:

• 北 (Běi): North / Northern
• 京 (Jīng): Capital

Which is way more accurate than “Beijing”.

Nevertheless, asking English speakers to perfectly preserve an endonym in every case is a tall ask. The People’s Republic of China realized this. They don’t demand that we all start using simplified Chinese characters when referring to Chinese place names.

Which is why they’re perfectly fine with “Beijing”.
RE: atomicpoet.org/objects/db3d494…

Chris Trottier

2026-06-14 05:31:50

@smn That argument only works if you believe endonyms are always correct. Which they’re not.

“Italia” isn’t necessarily the right way to refer to Italy, “Suomi” is not necessarily the right way to refer to Finland, and “日本” isn’t necessarily the right way to refer to Japan.

Exonyms are perfectly fine. Turks use them too.