Peter Kirk a Ãcrit :
On 03/07/2004 00:07, Patrick Andries wrote:
o very different political realities (before and after 1453). Cities
change names without going through transliterattions, cf. Berlin
(Ontario) becoming Kitchener in 1916.
But Constantinople -> Istanbul is not in fact this kind of name change, for Istanbul (that is, Ästanbul) is probably a corrupted and shortened version of Constantinople, with the initial I added to fit Turkish phonology (cf. the old western version Stamboul, still used in Russian, also Smyrna -> Izmir). (I have also heard it said that Istanbul comes from Greek EIS TÄN POLIN "to the city", but that seems less likely to me.)
Yes, I have heard this.
So the change is more like Beijing -> Peking than Berlin -> Kitchener.
Without a political change Constantinople would not have changed name in a matter of days (at least as far as the officials were concerned). In any case, it is not a transliteration problem (Beijing --> PÃkin).
P. A.
