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 -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
