Bombay/Mumbai is a bit of a puzzle (to me, at least). As far as I know,
it's a Portuguese name originally ('good bay'), so what I take to be the
local pronunciation 'Mumbai' seems to be an approximation/corruption of that
rather than a reversion to an authentic original. My friend there (born and
bred in the city) insists on using 'Bombay' (in conversation though not on
his business card, I notice) but I haven't ventured to probe the reasons.
Possibly some people there regard Mumbai as a vulgarization? But I have no
command of Indic languages so someone may be able to put me right!
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)" <[email protected]>
To: "Kamal Abdali" <[email protected]>
Cc: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <[email protected]>
Sent: 13 June 2011 08:37
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Persian verus Farsi
Kamal Abdali wrote:
Names are a very sensitive matter. Just look at the large number of
countries and cities that have been renamed in the last 30 or so years:
Burma -> Myanmar, Ceylon -> Sri Lanka, Rhodesia -> Zimbabwe, Basutoland
-> Lesotho,
The last is interesting, in that it is pronounced very similarly
to the leading element in "Basuto-land", and not at all as one
might expect from the spelling; I suspect that both it and the
next :
Bombay -> Mumbai,
as well as Peking -> Beijing and Calcutta -> Kolkata, are more a
matter of trying to better approximate native pronunciation of the
name in a non-native script.
Madras -> Chennai. The new names were
adopted by popular demand because the older names were thought to have
been introduced by colonizers, occupiers, ruling elites, etc.
I think that "by popular demand" is highly unlikely; they were adopted
for the very reason that you give -- because the earlier names were
the creations of colonizers, occupiers, ruling elites, etc., but not
"by popular demand" -- rather by the wish (or whim) of a government
wishing to sweep away the old, tainted, names and replace them by
something more original and authentic.
Philip Taylor
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