There was this big thing in America in the 1990s where everyone on public broadcasting started using the Spanish pronunciation of Latin American countries. It was pretty painful.
Ed, you have forgotten the greatest name change crime of history: the loss of Constantinople in exchange for the much more pedestrian Istanbul. Many languages still refer to the city as Constantinople, but at some point a grey-faced mid-wit bureaucrat, likely well-meaning but with all the imagination of grey-faced mid-wit bureaucrats, decided we must call it Istanbul and with a stroke of the pen, wiped away thousands of years of calling it Constantinople in the English language.
As you point out regarding Bombay/Mumbai, there are local complications in a lot of cases. Some residents of the southeast Asian country prefer Burma in opposition to the dictatorship, while others prefer Myanmar because they perceive Burma/Burmese as ethnically exclusive.
I held on to Moslem for a long time, but that made people really mad. In Spanish, they still say "musulman," though.
I agree. There's something annoying about people saying 'Mumbai' and Keev' as though they had said them that way all their lives. "Oh, didn't you know? The name has changed." They are the kind of people who say 'going forward' instead of 'in future', unembarrassed. Unfortunately I have given up on Peking. They wore me down in the end.
By the way, Athletic Bilbao (rather than Atletico) is so called because, like AC Milan, it was founded by Englishmen.
Another factor is English isn't spelt phonetically in a consistent way and loan words often retain all or some of their spelling from the original language, which can of course then be simply replaced with a new version. In Spanish or Italian words are generally spelt according to strict orthographic rules - a language that used to spell football as fútbol, whisky as güisqui, sandwich as sánguche, meeting as mitin, CD-ROM as cederrón or hippy as jipi (although these are less common these days) is probably more resistant to these changes in fashion. Largely, I'd say as pronunciation driving changes in spelling rather than vice-versa tends to make it more "sticky" as these kind of changes happen at a slower pace. I think this explains why English has been shedding exonyms for centuries (who now remembers Skagen was called the Scaw, or Frankfurt Frankfort, Pamplona Pampeluna, Mainz Mentz, Rouen Rone etc.)
There was this big thing in America in the 1990s where everyone on public broadcasting started using the Spanish pronunciation of Latin American countries. It was pretty painful.
Ed, you have forgotten the greatest name change crime of history: the loss of Constantinople in exchange for the much more pedestrian Istanbul. Many languages still refer to the city as Constantinople, but at some point a grey-faced mid-wit bureaucrat, likely well-meaning but with all the imagination of grey-faced mid-wit bureaucrats, decided we must call it Istanbul and with a stroke of the pen, wiped away thousands of years of calling it Constantinople in the English language.
As you point out regarding Bombay/Mumbai, there are local complications in a lot of cases. Some residents of the southeast Asian country prefer Burma in opposition to the dictatorship, while others prefer Myanmar because they perceive Burma/Burmese as ethnically exclusive.
I held on to Moslem for a long time, but that made people really mad. In Spanish, they still say "musulman," though.
I agree. There's something annoying about people saying 'Mumbai' and Keev' as though they had said them that way all their lives. "Oh, didn't you know? The name has changed." They are the kind of people who say 'going forward' instead of 'in future', unembarrassed. Unfortunately I have given up on Peking. They wore me down in the end.
By the way, Athletic Bilbao (rather than Atletico) is so called because, like AC Milan, it was founded by Englishmen.
Another factor is English isn't spelt phonetically in a consistent way and loan words often retain all or some of their spelling from the original language, which can of course then be simply replaced with a new version. In Spanish or Italian words are generally spelt according to strict orthographic rules - a language that used to spell football as fútbol, whisky as güisqui, sandwich as sánguche, meeting as mitin, CD-ROM as cederrón or hippy as jipi (although these are less common these days) is probably more resistant to these changes in fashion. Largely, I'd say as pronunciation driving changes in spelling rather than vice-versa tends to make it more "sticky" as these kind of changes happen at a slower pace. I think this explains why English has been shedding exonyms for centuries (who now remembers Skagen was called the Scaw, or Frankfurt Frankfort, Pamplona Pampeluna, Mainz Mentz, Rouen Rone etc.)
Oh God, Erdogan must have read this and felt left out.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-61671913
I was in Bombay the week they renamed it Mumbai. These changes always seem a bit petty to me, but that’s humans I guess.
Strange take.
So you’re ok with using the latinised Greece, and not Hellas, but latinised Kyev instead of Russian Kiev is a no go?
🤷♂️