Mr H

The constitution may say that but their visas say Republic of India.

raph

When traveling by car instead of plane, I regularly see Dunkerque (F), Duinkerke (NL), Dunkirk (GB), Dünkirchen (D).

That's when I travel to London/Londra/Londres :-)

How do you normally call a city? By it's local name, by the english name or the name in the language of the person you're talking to?

I find it interesting (being German) that abroad I would talk about Cologne and Munich, while the majority of non-german speakers knowing the places apparently called them "Köln and München" (even if not pronouncing the umlaut correctly )

Christopher

Interesting. Though a native English-speaker, I do speak German, and I'd regard it as seeming a bit affected to call those cities anything but "Cologne" or "Munich" in the middle of an English sentence, just as I would always pronounce "Paris" the English way when talking English.

The one exception might be if I were talking to German people in English, in which case I suppose I might call them "Köln" and "München", although in that case I'd probably take my cue from them.

If I were addressing a meeting, in English, that included both English speakers and German speakers, I'd probably use both terms the first time I mentioned the city and from then on just use one — probably the English one if I were talking in English.

nomad1974

One of the weirdest ones for me is Italy. In most languages I am aware of (happy to be corrected), it goes by some variation of that (Italia/Italy/Italie etc), EXCEPT in Polish where it's called "Włochy" (10 points for pronouncing that for non-Polish speakers ).

Another one is Istanbul. In Greek, the older name is kept: Κωνσταντινούπολη ("Constantinoupoli" i.e. Constantinople). In fact this is true for most cities in current-day Turkey, which were previously founded/inhabited by Greeks. Hence: Σμύρνη ("Smyrni", today Izmir), Τραπεζούντα ("Trapezounta", today Trabzon), Προύσα ("Proussa", today Bursa), Αττάλεια ("Attalia", today Antalya), etc etc.

colm

My most recent plane ticket to there said "Hindustan".

Omnivore

If they're football fans I can understand that. We all know 1.FC Koln, but if you called them Cologne I think some may be confused. Not as much with Bayern Munchen (as a Nurnberg fan booooooo) but still I think many Football fans know them by their native name.

mlbcard

I'd bet they're pretty bad corruptions of the native name.

cogitate

I am somewhat surprised. It is quite true that many Indians refer to India as Hindustan in conversation, but my impression had been that the term is avoided in official documents because Hindustan means, I think, Land of the Hindus. As a secular nation with significant populations of minority religions like Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, etc., India avoids referring to itself as a Hindu nation in official documents. Of course a plane ticket is hardly an official document!

AJO

The Austrian city of Klagenfurt is officially bi-lingual (German and Slovenian), and the Slovenian name of the city is Celovec.

The border region of Slovenia with Italy is also bi-lingual. For example, the Slovenian city of Koper is known in Italian as Capodistria. Another example in the region is Miren-Kostanjevica, known in Italian as Merna Castagnevizza.

In German speaking countries, Milan / Milano (Italy) is known as Mailand. Venice / Venezia (It) is known as Venedig. Also, Nice (France) is known as Nizza in both German and Italian.

stut

It wasn't to Bangalore, by any chance? The new airport there is known as 'Bangalore Hindustan Airport' (among many other combinations of related words).

[back to the subject matter in hand]

India's a difficult one as far as place names go, due to the number of languages in the country. There are those who see Hindi as 'the language, but this is far from the truth. The relatively recent round of renaming is, in part, to reverse anglicisation of some names (although don't forget that English can act as a lingua franca within the country, but sometimes, the motivation may be more political.

Bangalore was indeed a anglicisation of the Kannada name Bengaluru, just as Calcutta was an anglicisation of the Bengali name Kolkata. Madras and Chennai (the latter now being the official name of what was the former), however, were completely distinct settlements around both of which the city was formed - it's not even clear where the names come from. Bombay is supposedly from the Portuguese 'bom bahia' (which is gramatically incorrect), yet the city was known as 'Manbai' before that. Mumbai is derived from the name of the goddess Mumba (in Marathi), and the original name may be related. But is giving such a multicultural city a Marathi-derived name an anti-imperial stance, or is it giving prominence to one particular ethnic group?

I've no doubt there are all sorts of renamings in this vein, the world over.

Ben Ell

I was just going to say about Bangkok/Krung Thep

Only learnt this today talking to a Thai co-worker. From what she was saying, Bangkok is one side of the river and Krung Tep is the other, non-Thais call the whole city Bangkok, Thais call the whole city Krung Thep (the shortened official name)

Mr H

Are you the Pope?

ajax

Indeed, this is what they were shouting from the Indian side of the Wagah border crossing when our side was shouting "Pakistan!"

eefor jfp

This is also true of the slavic translations--Nizozemska is also "low countries".

The fun one for me is the word for German/Germany in the Slavic languages. Njemačka and similar translations come from the root word "njem" which means "mute" because the slavs couldn't understand the Germans and figured they might as well just be unable to speak.

jpatokal

Roughly. Back in the days when the capital was still in Ayutthaya, there was a hamlet called Bang Makok ("Village of the Olives") on the west bank of the river, and this is probably the source of the Western name. After King Taksin got his rear kicked by the Burmese in 1767 and had to flee south, he founded his new capital Thonburi on the same spot, and that's what the west bank is called today... and Krung Thep was founded in 1782 when the next king after Taksin decided to rebuild on the east bank, where the bulk of the city is today.