[XeTeX] Persian verus Farsi

[Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)]

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