更: geng and jing

Question

One of the less common meanings of 更 has to do with traditional Chinese time-keeping. There's a changing of the guard, and this is kept track of by hitting a drum or whatever. 更, extending from the meaning of "to change", "to take turns", etc. refers to this period of time. It shows up in 满江红 in the scene I screencapped.

In the movie, they pronounce it as jīng. I was only familiar with the pronunciation of gēng. Is this a 白文异读 sort of thing? Where does the jīng pronunciation come from? Wiktionary lists both gēng and jīng as acceptable pronunciations, but there's only one Middle Chinese pronunciation listed, and the expected Mandarin reflex is gēng. So... what's the deal?

Edit:

• 耕 also exhibits something similar. In some northern Mandarin dialects, it's jing-like and in some it's geng-like (and in some it's both). This points towards a 白文异读 explanation where each pronunciation comes from a different Mandarin dialect. I'll try and find more words that fit this theory and add them here.

Answer 1

This might help: regional-variations-on-三更半夜

After comparing among all of ourselves, it seemed that southerners tended to use 深更半夜 while northerners tended to use 三经半夜.

经 is pronounced as /jing1/

The movies used /jing1/ reading instead of /geng1/ might be due to the speaker being a Northerner

And you already found out /jing1/ is an acceptable pinyin of 更.

From the accepted answer:

三经半夜 is not valid or formal Chinese. 经 cannot be used to substitute 更 both in writing or in pronunciation in formal Chinese. However, it is widely used in speaking

/jing1/ seems to be a regional pronunciation of 更/jeng1/ for some northerner

Answer 2

Both 漢典 and 國語辭典 list the pronunciation of 三更 as sāngēng. In 漢典, 更 has two pronunciations - gēng and gèng. It doesn't pronunciate as jing. In 國語辭典，更 has a third pronunciation - jing but only in phrases such as 少不更事 in which 更 means 經歷.

According to the above two dictionaries, 更 in 三更、五更、打更, etc. all should be pronounced as gēng though I have heard people pronounce it as jing in those cases.

Answer 3

更 gēng: 量词。旧时夜间计时单位，一夜分为五更，每更约两小时

更 ㄐㄧㄥ jīng

動

經歷、經過。如：「少不更事」。《史記·卷一二三·大宛傳》：「漢方欲事滅胡，……因欲通使，道必更匈奴中，乃募能使者。」

Funny, across languages, across the world, letters, sounds, may have different sounds.

g is j: gin, ginger
g is ge: God, gone

How to pronounce: gēng?

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One is: f is h: 福建省

In Spanish:

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Arriving in 南昌, the train conductor walked through the train shouting: Lanchang daole, Lanchang daole

人们: lenmen
如果: luguo

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