[XeTeX] Persian verus Farsi

[John Was]

Bombay/Mumbai is a bit of a puzzle (to me, at least).  As far as I know, 
it's a Portuguese name originally ('good bay'), so what I take to be the 
local pronunciation 'Mumbai' seems to be an approximation/corruption of that 
rather than a reversion to an authentic original.  My friend there (born and 
bred in the city) insists on using 'Bombay' (in conversation though not on 
his business card, I notice) but I haven't ventured to probe the reasons. 
Possibly some people there regard Mumbai as a vulgarization?  But I have no 
command of Indic languages so someone may be able to put me right!


John







----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd)" <P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk>
To: "Kamal Abdali" <k.abdali at acm.org>
Cc: "Unicode-based TeX for Mac OS X and other platforms" <xetex at tug.org>
Sent: 13 June 2011 08:37
Subject: Re: [XeTeX] Persian verus Farsi


>
>
> 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
>
>
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