Soviet-Empire.com U.S.S.R. and communism historical discussion.
21 Aug 2011, 12:41
Comrades, let's share your demographics to see how the population of S-E is spread.
21 Aug 2011, 14:01
Im 16 so, nothing exciting has ever happened in my lifetime..... yet.
21 Aug 2011, 14:26
Jingle_Bombs wrote:Surely 9/11 was fairly exciting?
Not for a six-year old, though
21 Aug 2011, 16:13
Comrade Yagoda is 64 , i remember in 1953 hearing the announcement of Comrade Stalins death over Radio Moscow my dad had our old Victory Wireless on !
21 Aug 2011, 16:16
What was it like to be a child under Stalin? I am quite amazed that you would have lived through Stalin, Kruschev, Brezhnev and all the rest. Also how was life under Kruschev?
21 Aug 2011, 16:18
I'm 23. I am amazed at how young and well-informed so many of our members are!
21 Aug 2011, 16:57
Born 3 years before the "end" of the Cold War, the year before before all the unrest in the Warsaw Pact countries. For a more specific time frame: About 7 - 8 months before the protests in the PRC, and 12 - 13 months before all the protests in Berlin.
21 Aug 2011, 19:15
I just missed the Soviet Union, and didn't even know it ever existed until 9 years later.
What a waste...
What a waste...
21 Aug 2011, 22:10
1971, during Brezhnev's prime and Nixon-Mao's Beijing Honeymoon. Except it was Peking in those days.
21 Aug 2011, 22:16
Order227 wrote:1971... Except it was Peking in those days.
I think it still is, Peking. At least that's how it's called in Slovenian.
22 Aug 2011, 02:01
Time for Komissar_KW's fun Chinese-related facts!
It's Beijing in standard Chinese, and most modern maps in North America use that. I don't know about in Europe.
Peking is based on the Wade-Giles system, and there's mostly likely some dialect at play involved in that too.
There's a confusing situation where some things have kept the old Wade-Giles transliteration and others have not. For example, the famous
"Peking duck" is still referred to as such in English. Qinghua University still uses the old way of writing "Tsinghua" in their English name, out of tradition.
And now we return to our regular programming.
It's Beijing in standard Chinese, and most modern maps in North America use that. I don't know about in Europe.
Peking is based on the Wade-Giles system, and there's mostly likely some dialect at play involved in that too.
There's a confusing situation where some things have kept the old Wade-Giles transliteration and others have not. For example, the famous
"Peking duck" is still referred to as such in English. Qinghua University still uses the old way of writing "Tsinghua" in their English name, out of tradition.
And now we return to our regular programming.
22 Aug 2011, 02:21
Im pretty sure that it usually appears as "Peking" in Danish lexicons and whatnot, but I might be remembering it wrong.
22 Aug 2011, 02:38
Just one more thing about Beijing vs Peking that I found between when I made that previous post and now:
http://www.logoi.com/notes/peking-beijing.html
It should also be noted that the ROC/Taiwan was the officially recognized "China" at the UN and relations between China and the US did not establish official relations until the end of the 1970's, which was probably the only way the Chinese could have been able to "export" so to speak the official transliteration on the Mainland.
That thing about how Peking is easier to pronounce than Beijing is kind of weird. They were right, though, I never knew about "Peking" and always found that to be odd when I first came to the West.
http://www.logoi.com/notes/peking-beijing.html
Quote:The Chinese capital did not change its name but Chinese words became spelled in English differently. In Chinese, the name stayed exactly the same and most Chinese people are not even aware that some Westerners think that there has been a name change. The old spelling has been Peking, this is how the city appeared in most earlier discourse. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the government adopted the pinyin transliteration method and used this to write all of the proper names (including place names, people's names, etc) using the Latin alphabet. Theoretically, this was when Peking became known in the West as Beijing. In reality, however, the West has been using the old spelling long after it has been replaced in China. It is only sometime in the 1980s that China started to enforce its official name on all flights, sea routes and official documents. This is why the name Peking is still echoing in our minds and people continue to use it even today. Needless to say, it is easier to pronounce than Beijing, which is an important factor too.
It should also be noted that the ROC/Taiwan was the officially recognized "China" at the UN and relations between China and the US did not establish official relations until the end of the 1970's, which was probably the only way the Chinese could have been able to "export" so to speak the official transliteration on the Mainland.
That thing about how Peking is easier to pronounce than Beijing is kind of weird. They were right, though, I never knew about "Peking" and always found that to be odd when I first came to the West.
22 Aug 2011, 03:18
I was in 1989, during the wave of counter-revolution and five years before the tragic death of Kim Il-Sung.
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