History by Letter - N

It's a variant spelling, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English.

It's a variant spelling of Nefertiti according to the Oxford Dictionary of English.

Indeed.

Well, your school is wrong. In China, we can use traditional characters or use pingying, which is the representation of characters as English spellings. Our pronunciation of these letters differs from the American pronunciations, and since you Americans have the most boring monotonous speech, its hard for Westerners to differentiate the q and k and k and j a so on. The spelling is DEFINITELY Nanjing.

And is that harder or easier than differentiating between 'pingying' and the correct spelling/pronunciation, 'pinyin'?

@Dragonlife. You're wrong. Up until the 1980s the romanised spellings of Chinese place names were used in English and many other languages, including Peking, Nanking, Chungking etc. Note they're still used for Chinese-speaking areas outside of the mainland (Hong Kong, Macau, Taipei, Kaohsiung etc.). These spellings are still commonly used in various languages.

It was the 1960s in a small town in Missouri, and in both world history and geography classes we learned about countries and cities outside of the USA. I don't understand why that seems surprising. There's a brand of canned Chinese food in the US called Chun King (founded by an Italian), and Chinese restaurant menus still have Peking duck, not Beijing duck. There's an American bar named the Bombay Bicycle Club - the old forms of the names are still around. So back then, the spelling was DEFINITELY Nanking in my textbook whether or not it was considered correct in China. Even Wikipedia lists it as "Nanjing, alternatively romanized as Nanking or Nankin."

Pinyin only became official in the 1980s. The fact that there is an official transliteration doesn't by any means make other transliterations "wrong", unless by "wrong" you mean non-official.

@benny7401 the r*pe of nanking

Nanking is the old romanticization, like Peking for Beijing. Nanjing is correct, but Nanking should be accepted.

Nankin could be accepted as an alternative, but Chunkin or Chun King or something like that are absolutely wrong, as they are alternative names of a totally different city Chongqing.

Imagine if they’d stayed and the US had to buy it off of them, then there’d just be an unusually high amount of people in NY with Dutch ancestry

The wife of Nostredame?

As any Asterix reader kno...