Jungguk

We are going to China for a few days. The blog will return when we do.

Our destination in China is Qīngdǎo (青岛), probably best known outside the country for the eponymously named beer produced there (though not eponymously spelled: Tsingtao). The name of this city has caused considerable confusion in Korean.

Most Chinese cities have two possible pronunciations in Korean. One is based on the Sino-Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters that write the city name; the other is based on a transliteration of the standard Chinese pronunciation of the city name. So, for example, Beijing is sometimes called Bukgyeong 북경, which is the Korean pronunciation of 北京 (which means 'Northern Capital'), and sometimes called Beijing 베이징, which is an imitation of the Chinese pronunciation Běijīng.

In Korean, Qingdao can be pronounced Chingdau 칭다우, imitating the Chinese pronunciation, or Cheongdo 청도, reading the Chinese characters in Sino-Korean pronunciation. The latter seems to be more common, and the reason its confusing is that it sounds very much like the Chinese (and English) pronunciation of the capital of Sichuan province, Chengdu 城都.

This has led to a number of misunderstandings, especially when talking with Chinese people here. When speaking in Korean, it's hard to know when you hear something like "Cheongdo" whether this is an attempt to say the capital of Sichuan in Chinese or the beer city in Korean.

When we were buying our tickets at the travel agency on campus, a Chinese guy who didn't speak too much Korean was sitting next to us also buying tickets to Qingdao. The travel agent knew that what she called Cheongdo was called Chingdau (aka Qingdao) by Chinese and English speakers, and she also knew that there was confusion with the Sichuan capital, which she called Seongdo. But she couldn't remember what Chinese speakers called the latter. Hoping to get this all straight, and seizing the opportunity of having a Chinese speaker in front of her, she asked him how he pronounced the capital of Sichuan, and helpfully showed him the Chinese characters. The Chinese guy, however, started to go into a panic that he was being sold tickets to Chengdu instead of to Qingdao, and the more the travel agent tried to straighten him out, the more agitated he became.

Anyway, hopefully we will end up going to the right city, and we will report back upon our return.