What is Chinese place names?
'''Chinese place names''' are the names of places in [[China]]. Since the Chinese language has not had any sort of [[Phonetics|phonetic]] [[alphabet]] until only about a few hundred years ago (compared to the thousands of years the [[Chinese characters]] have been used), there has been a lot of confusion on naming places in Chinese. Since Chinese characters are a [[Logogram|logographic]] [[writing system]], meaning that the writing mainly shows the words' meaning rather than its [[pronunciation]], it can be used to write down words in many different languages. On top of all this, the [[Chinese language]] is not one unified language, but an entire [[Language family|branch]] of the [[Sino-Tibetan languages|Sino-Tibetan language family]]. Many of the Chinese [[Language|languages]] or [[Dialect|dialects]] are [[Mutual intelligibility|mutually unintelligible]], which means a speaker of one language or dialect cannot understand a speaker of another unless one of them already knew the other's language or dialect. For example, [[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]] and [[Cantonese language|Cantonese]] are both dialects of Chinese, but they are so different from each other than their speakers cannot understand the other unless at least one speaker knew both. Therefore, knowing which spoken dialect to use when writing out the name in the [[Latin script|Roman alphabet]], which is a phonetic writing system and not a logographic one, can be challenging. For example, while the name of the city is written as 北京 in Chinese, it is called ''Běijīng'' in Mandarin and ''Bak1 Ging1'' in Cantonese. In [[mainland China]], most place names are in Mandarin Chinese, the [[Country|country's]] [[Official language|official spoken language]]. Even though the sounds of Mandarin Chinese have not changed for a long time, there were many different ways to write Chinese place names in Mandarin using the Roman alphabet, or many different kinds of [[Romanization|romanizations]]. This created a lot of confusion and misinformation for non-Chinese speakers on