Originally Posted by
Helena Handbaskets
Perhaps it's just me being uncharitable, but it has often seemed to me that the British imperialists had such little regard for their imperial subjects (or potential subjects) that they were way lazy in trying to accurately transliterate native place names, particularly in India and China, giving us names like Peking, Canton, Bombay, etc. I confess that I'm not basing this on any knowledge of the actual history, so if I'm off base, I'm happy to be corrected.
Transliteration is an art as much as a science, with the aim being to strike a compromise. I think that Bombay, for example, is just a different way of "hearing" Mumbai, since a native of that city doesn't pronounce the name of the city in quite the way that "Mumbai" would suggest to, say, an English person or an American: it's similar, but not identical.
And after all, if the British, instead of the French, had transliterated Vientiane, I guess we'd know the city as Vienchang or something like that. But the French had trouble with the "ch" type of sound in the middle, and so the transliteration that they have was a way of trying, as best they could, to convey the name according to the spelling conventions of their language. I doubt any insult or lack of regard was particularly intended. And indeed, probably neither Vientiane nor Vienchang gives a completely accurate rendering of the original...