Noncompositional

I suppose I shouldn’t really care that nearly every time someone one the news utters the name of the capital city of China, they use a “soft j” (aka [ʒ]), rather than the standard Mandarin “hard j” ([ʤ] would be the closest sound in English). I mean, it’s not that big a deal, and hyperforeignization is, after all, a fact of linguistic life. Probably serves me right for trying to be bilingual.

[Update: Ben Zimmer's pointer to Bill Poser's similar comments reminded me of another set of cases: pronunciation of Chavez with initial "sh" (as in, say, Cesar Chavez Street (formerly Army St) in San Francisco). The same probably goes for several other cases of "ch" in Spanish (machete anyone?)]