My impression at the time was that these people, who formed a fairly tight community, presented themselves as 'Persian' rather than 'Iranian' and spoke 'Persian' rather than.(the word 'Farsi' was not so much in current use at the time, but I suspect for continuity sake they just used 'Persian'.) My suspicion continues to be that this community used these terms in order to distinguish themselves from the politics and connotations of the post-Shah era in Iran.
Years ago I lived in Los Angeles, which is home to many immigrants from Iran who migrated there about the time of the fall of the Shah. I really agree with Jeremy about the cultural complications of the speakers and listeners involved in any instance of language usage. I'm not sure where the "j" sound came from, but we can hardly say that we should keep using a pronunciation that was always incorrect even in our own spelling system. Since is a voiced, and is a voiced, we should have been saying at least "Beging" all along.
"Peking" was a phonetic spelling using a method of Romanization in which letters with apostophes after them were voiceless, and ones without were voiced. There's no poitical correctness involved these same linguists, when speaking in English, refer to "German" rather than "Deutsch." And really, what would we gain by using "Persian," beyond people thinking that there still is a country called "Persia?"Īs for "Beijing," that was pretty much how "Peking" was supposed to have been pronounced all along. That's because a distinction is made between older and more literary forms of the language, and the modern, common version. I don't know much about why so many people have starting using "Farsi." Linguists, however, have been using it for years.
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