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.