Alternative place names?

[Vadim Vygonets]

Quoth Oscar van Vlijmen on Wed, Sep 27, 2000:
> > Paul Eggert, Vadim Vygonets, Antoine Leca / China: Chongqing
> Officially (Peking University course) the q- sound is an aspirated voiceless
> affricate, with j- the unaspirated voiceless counterpart. In practice j-
> sounds more like the (voiced!) g- in English genuine and q- more like the
> ch- in English chew. How Chongqing is pronounced in Chongqing I do not know.

Sounds like "Tsongtsing" to me.  In the Chongqing dialect.

In Mandarin it sounds very much like "Tsungjing", where 'Ts' is
slightly voiced, 'u' is like English 'u' in "pub" (anyone knows
where I can get decent beer in Tokyo?), and 'j' is slightly less
voiced than in English (somewhat close to 'ch').  At least that's
the impression I got.  But what do I know, I'm definitely not a
native Mandarin speaker.

Anyway, the impression I got is that neither of these
transliterations represents either Mandarin or Chongqing
pronounciation.  But then, 'Finland' is pretty far from 'Suomi',
isn't it?

> > Vadim Vygonets / Kirgizstan
> BTW: Kyrgyz is not a Russian (Slavonic) language, but a Turkic language, and
> -i- and -y- indeed do sound different.

Yes, I know this much, but I'm not familiar with Turkic languages
(to the point that I don't speak any of them), despite my roots.
I heard people from Azerbaijan pronouncing words with the 'y'
sound, and it sounds like a cross between Russian 'y'
(represented by the Cyrillic letter called Yery in old Cyrillic
alphabet and one standard or another, which is accidentally the
same sound as 'y' in my last name) and Russian 'u' (very like
English 'u' in "put").  But don't quote me on this, I may be
mistaken.

Vadik, not speaking any of these languages.

-- 
Avoid reality at all costs.