The English name of Mumbai used to be Bombay, but now it's changed. Bombay is now as much an anachronism as Batavia.The entire issue of the name "Bombay" versus "Mumbai" is not even close to as cut and dried as you might imagine. For some of my take on this, check
http://wordsmith.org/board/showthreaded.pl?Cat=&Board=words&Number=6845&page=10&view=collapsed&sb=5&vc=1#Post6845.
The question to ask is this: in today's cosmopolitan world where people are not necessarily any longer known by their locality (I have moved city two or three times in my life), who actually 'owns' the name of a place?
[mild rant]
The Brits are the major visitors to Ibiza and provide the lifeblood (monetarily) of the community. Are they arrogant, or just doing the right thing, when they pronounce the name Eye-beetha?
I grew up in Bombay and lived there for 22 years. Why does a fascistic, non-secular, right wing political organisation (the
Shiv Sena, for those not familiar with Bombay politics) have the right to tell me that the name I use for 'my' city is wrong? Whose city is it anyway? Nowhere in India except in Bombay was the name 'Mumbai' common. So do the rest of the Indians (a mere 985,000,000 of them) have no say in the name of their richest and most populous city? For what it's worth, my parents still live in Bombay and I know that less than half the population wanted the name changed - it was pushed through by the Shiv Sena on the back of their having a minority government, and thugs who threw stones at establishments that didn't change their shop signs and headed paper.
I admit that there is apparently an 'arrogance' implicit in the fact that we say Florence instead of Firenze or Venice instead of Venezia, but this is not always avoidable. CapK, I think, below spoke of the fact that our names will rarely fit Japanese pronunciation conventions - since they tend not to have compound consonants. It would surely be an act of supreme arrogance on our part to presume to tell the Japanese to change their language to accomodate our names.
Are we really, in the name of political correctness, expected to say Frawns, or La Frawns or La Frawnsay (apologies for inadequate orthography) for France?
Names are conventional, IMO. When a convention has been established it is counter-productive to attempt to overthrow it - if the intention is clear, let it stay. We show sensitivity these days towards the names of places that are new to us, or have been recently created. I am not sure there is a good reason to backtrack through the English language, 'correcting' the spelling and pronunciation of long-standing English conventions.
[/mild rant]
cheer
the sunshine warrior
