BBC newsreaders have for years pronounced "Beijing" wrongly, with a French j. (It's actually Bei as in eBay, jing as in jingle.) They ought to know better, they used to pride themselves on getting pronunciations right. But it's not just the BBC that's guilty of assuming Chinese is exotique like, you know, French - most Westerners in general seem to do that. Here's an amusing YouTube video making the point:
In a recent documentary series on Five, Mystery of the Mummies, in episode 2 China's Mystery Mummies (replayable online for a short while longer) the narrator pronounced "Loulan" with a nasal "a" and no "n" at the end, exactly as if it were French. It's actually "a" as in "ah", and you do pronounce the "n" at the end! (Not sure why Wikipedia have spelt it "Loulan", I believe it should be "Lulan" though my Chinese is pretty non-existent. But more existent than the BBC's or documentary makers', obviously).
To top it all, when reporting on the surprise at Wimbledon yesterday when Chinese player Zheng Jie knocked out world no. 1 Ana Ivanović, the BBC commentator actually pronounced her name using a French j at the start of both words! (Hellooo, "zh" isn't "j", that might be a bit of a clue that they're pronounced differently?).
Here's proof in the form of a short clip extracted from the video in the BBC news item (which I combined with a photo of Zheng Jie from Wikipedia just so I could upload the combo to YouTube, only for the purposes of reporting/commenting on it of course!):
The "Zh" should be like the "g" in "merger", the "eng" is neutral like "uhng". "Jie" is "jee-eh" - not "ie" as in "wiener", and it's an English j, there should be nary a French j anywhere in her name - see Wikipedia or this page on Chinese phonetics. (And no, the sounds in the credits are not the sound of me hitting the BBC with a tennis ball. However tempting that may be.)
Bah, why can't the BBC just get it right? I don't know why I find this sort of thing so annoying and irritating, but I do...
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