Originally Posted by
Mr H
Indeed, although it can change with time. Twenty years ago everyone used to say Peking - now you'd sound quaint if you did. Similar change is afoot with some place names in India, with Mumbai now used pretty much universally instead of Bombay. Others such as Chennai are probably a few years behind in being adopted, but they will be adopted.
Indeed so. Though I'm not sure why we make these changes. After all, we call the country "Germany", the French call it "Allemagne", but the occupants themselves call it "Deutschland". The people of "München" are not bothered when we call their city "Munich", neither are the people of "London" or "Edinburgh" worried when the French refer to "Londres" or "Edimbourg".
I would have said that the English name for the Chinese city is "Peking", so I'm not really sure why we have all had to change to "Beijing" (although I have). Similarly with "Mumbai" and "Kolkata". "Chennai" instead of "Madras" is a different type of change, since "Beijing", "Mumbai" and "Kolkata" are just different ways of transliterating "Peking", "Bombay" and "Calcutta" into the Latin alphabet, whereas "Chennai" and "Madras" are different words. In fact, I believe that they are part of the names of two towns that were subsumed into the urban metropolis that came to be called first "Madras" but now "Chennai"; "Madras" was considered to be possibly Portuguese.