Hey Rouspetur

Just a question. Several years ago, Peking was changed to Beijing for English speakers and writers at least. Could one of the issues be the desire to try to make the spelling close to how a native of the area would pronounce it regardless of the conventions of decades or centuries. Perhaps, not wanting to appear to Anglo-centric and not sensitive enough to the concerns of the locals. (In either case I think it is a bit silly. I doubt many French people resent that the Germans call la France das Frankreich or Austrians who mind that the English call their country Austria when they know it as das Osterreich.)

I suspect that there is a distinction between names always written in Roman (no matter what the language) and those which are only transcribed into it - from, say, Chinese or Hindi or Arabic. Certainly I would find it strange to call the basics of mathematics Al-jibr (al-muqabla), after the original Arabic phrase from which we get algebra, but that is quite distinct from a given name. Where names like Frankreich or Osterreich are used (or even the Netherlands, 'Dutch' or l'Angleterre) it is because there is primarily a convention of description in the related European languages - denoting the lands of the angles, the franks, and so on. So they are not different ways of spelling/pronouncing the same word - but rather descriptions in different languages of the same thing. With a name like Beijing, on the other hand, since Peking was an early (and rather flawed) attempt at rendering the sound in English, I suspect that if the Chinese themselves are certain that Beijing does it better, we can have no cause for argument - they are supposed to be the same word, after all. It is not like the seemingly endless changing of the names of Stalingrad-Petrograd and its ilk.

Is it this sort of idea behind the new spelling cropping up of that famous person's name?

To be honest, I don't the spelling is new. As far as I am aware Gandhi (who did take his law degree in London, and was fluently literate in English) always spelled his name this way.

Now an annectdote, possibly apochryphal. A Canadian wrote to the OED people to complain that the listed pronunciation for Newfoundland was incorrect. The correct pronunciation sounds like "new-fund-land" (sorry, I don't know, or understand, all those fancy symbols used to show pronunciation) while the dictionary listed it as the equivalent of "new-FOUND-land". The editors' response was that in all cases they tried to show the pronunciation as a native would say it, and that was how a native of Oxford pronounced it.

Excellent!
To be honest (and I don't know which dictionary I got this from), I have always pronounced it NEWf'ndl'nd (the ' representing the schwa).

cheer

the sunshine ("read my lips: s-u-n-s-h-i-n-e") warrior