Similarly, Visakhapatnam is typically just called Vizag (at least by the Indians I know that live and visit there).
Those came about because standard sets of type were intended for English, and anthropologists wanting to transliterate native names for places found they had problems, because some sounds were a lot more common than they were in English, while others were less common, or non-existent. So they would come up with substitutions. I guess “B” is much more common in whatever Chinese dialect calls the city “Beijing,” and “j” is common as well, letters that the anthropologists trying to set papers to mail back home, kept running out of. “P” I guess wasn’t common, nor was “k” (or maybe “K”), so they used “Peking” for “Beijing.” The people who set up the system knew to look at “Peking,” and pronounce it “Beijing,” but the system got lost.
Eventually, there were better methods of printing, or people could use typewriters, and send one copy of a paper back home, and have it typeset and printed there. But old names people were used to persisted.
It wasn’t until the information age, that there was the opportunity to correct old errors, and disseminate correct (or, more correct) pronunciations of city names.
They’ll probably never call the dog “Beijinese,” though.
Okay, I knew that the City of London was not a borough of London and had its own municipal administration. I was not aware it also participated in Greater London Authority.
Ummm. Is this some sort of whoosh?
In case it isn’t, Peking was the Postal Map Romanization of the characters of the city’s name, based on the pronunciation of those characters in southern Chinese dialects/languages. These were the first Chinese that westerners had extended contact with and got the name of the capitol from them. The southerners had more or less retained an older pronunciation of the chracters while Mandarin had drifted to the current Beijing.
The “Beijing” romanization became standard when the PRC adopted Pinyin as the standard method to romanize Standard Mandarin. This meant that the standard Mandarin pronunciation was finally being used to romanize the characters.
Nothing whatsoever to do with movable type, typewriters, or the information age.
Somewhat the same with Normandy, Missouri in suburban St. Louis. Normandy is both a city and an area including a bunch of small towns, villages and various unincorporated bits. They all share a ZIP code and a school district, but Normandy is only a small part of Normandy.
Nor will there ever be a dish called Beijing duck.
Bainbridge Island, WA, before it was incorporated into a single city, was a collection of townships like Winslow, Rolling Bay and Lynwood Center. Some businesses (like Bay Hay & Feed) still use these old names on their letterhead. The ferry between Seattle and Bainbridge had signs calling it “the Winslow ferry” until surprisingly recently, and many residents still call it that.
Reston, VA gobbled up some sparsely-populated prior towns. One of them, Sunset Hills, was in its entirety the A. Smith Bowman Distillery. When its Reston location was still operational (I think they relocated to Fredericksburg in the 90s), it always referred to itself as “Sunset Hills, VA.”
Alexandria, VA has some of the most well-defined city limits of any city in Virginia. But its northernmost neighborhoods refer to themselves as “Arlandria” and much of unincorporated Fairfax County directly south and west of it uses “Alexandria” as a mailing address. Neighboring Arlington, technically a county containing one city, still has its neighborhoods referred to as towns (Rosslyn VA, Crystal City VA, etc.).
Some of Washington DC’s outer borough residents use the name of the neighborhood/bordering Maryland town in their mailing address (Takoma DC, Chevy Chase DC, Brookland DC, Georgetown DC). This was the correct thing to do until the 1960s, I’m told, when Washington proper was boundaried by Rock Creek and Rhode Island Avenue. Sometime during the LBJ administration, the Territorial Governor position was renamed “Mayor” and everything inside Western, Eastern and Southern Avenues was properly referred to as “Washington.” Home Rule was still a few years off and it’s still far from absolute.
A buddy of mine used to run a mail-order business in New Jersey and had “Hell Township” on his letterhead. Turns out you can call your city/town/municipality anything you want as long as you get the ZIP Code right.
[quote=“RivkahChaya, post:42, topic:692814”]
Those came about because standard sets of type were intended for English, and anthropologists wanting to transliterate native names for places found they had problems, because some sounds were a lot more common than they were in English, while others were less common, or non-existent. So they would come up with substitutions. I guess “B” is much more common in whatever Chinese dialect calls the city “Beijing,” and “j” is common as well, letters that the anthropologists trying to set papers to mail back home, kept running out of. “P” I guess wasn’t common, nor was “k” (or maybe “K”), so they used “Peking” for “Beijing.” The people who set up the system knew to look at “Peking,” and pronounce it “Beijing,” but the system got lost.
/QUOTE]
Minor error in there… Its not the frequency of the usage, its the number of discrete sounds you want to record… you want to record two different B’s, and you notice that chinese doesn’t have any P sounds… so you use P for your 2nd B sound. Maybe you have a P’ if you really want to write P sound P.
In Indiana, there is a place called Ovid or New Columbus, and its welcome signs say so.
I often call my home town “East Cicero, Illinois.”
I do gather that the southern half of India is famous / notorious for proper names “as long as your arm”. Another example, the city of Tiruchchirappalli – in Raj times, officially Trichinopoly; and, I understand, usually informally called Trichi. Also Tirunelveli – under British rule, Tinnevelly. The travel writer Dervla Murphy, who spent time in the south of India in the 1970s and mostly loved the area, wrote to the effect of: “I am blessed with neither a good ear nor a good memory, so southern-Indian names are a sore trial to me”.
Harumph! What do they know? :mad:
I have a copy of Esdaille’s Manual of Bibliography which includes a list of imprints–i.e., the stated city of publication. Many of the names are Latin translations, or long since disused English renditions (e.g. Treves). Some names soar into the realm of imagination and fancy for no obvious reason, from the perspective of a modern reader, e.g. “Cosmopolis” for Constantinople (almost always fictitious).
I suspect this book is in the public domain, so I’ll look into the possibility of posting the list and run it by the mods.
Similarly, La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís, aka Santa Fe NM.
For an example of one still actually used a fair amount, El Paso TX is referred to by some Spanish-speaking southwesterners as El Paso del Norte.
Llanfairpwllgwyngyll is a large village on the island of Anglesey in Wales. It is alternatively known as, most commonly, Llanfair PG or, in full, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
I’m digging back in my memory to my Beijing trip about 10 years ago, and I wasn’t feeling well* this particular day, but I’m pretty sure I ordered Beijing Duck at a restaurant.
I think this is actually how I came to realize that Beijing and Peking are the same place.
*I was recovering from a nice bout of food poisoning. And hiking up the Great Wall without enough water. In July.
By my understanding, the village’s name was originally, just Llanfairpwllgwyngyll: some time during the last couple of centuries, waggish persons obviously with some influence locally, added all the other stuff on, in a spirit of satire of the tendency of not-very-large Welsh villages, to have hugely-long Welsh names. The whole rigmarole does have a meaning – lots of topographical and saints-and-churches stuff. If I understand rightly, the colossally-long name was seized on by locals seeing it as a way of cashing in on the tourist-and-curiosities factor. The village has a railway station, bearing the full long name – generally acknowledged as the rail station with the longest name (without intervening apostrophes) in the world.
That’s what Wikipedia says:
By apostrophes above, I meant hyphens. Lynne Truss would have my guts for garters…