But recently, on the radio I heard a classic recording of a comedy show, and darned if the comedians were not doing virtually a word by word of the “They might be giants” song! Sadly I missed both the beginning and the end of the show so I could not identify the players. Does anybody know who were those comedians? FWIW I think the recording and commercials sounded circa 1950.
And oh yeah: Why they changed New Amsterdam to New York?
Istanbul also was called Bazance and, I’m not making this up, New Rome once, after it became the capital of the eastern part of the Empire (split for administratory reasons).
Paris used to be Lutetia.
Cairo started out as Fustat.
The West Side of Cleveland started out as Ohio City.
Medina used to be Yathrib (I mean the Medina in Arabia, not the one in Ohio).
Lots of these in Africa — Léopoldville/Kinshasa, Salisbury/Harare, Bathurst/Banjul, etc.
And Asia — Khaghanbalghasu/Peip‘ing/Beijing, Edo/Tôkyô, Madras/Cennai, etc.
Then it’d be Byzantion, since it was a Greek town.
(I didn’t know the English term, so I googled a few versions, and I got quite a number of hits for Byzance, so I assumed this was it. In German, it’s “Byzanz”.)
And yes, we refer to Charlemagne as “Karl der Große”.
The English didn’t “take away” New Amsterdam from the Dutch; it was traded to the English, who in return gave the tulip-eaters Suriname. For centuries, the Dutch considered this a good trade, since the U.S. colonies rebelled, whereas Suriname didn’t gain full independence until the mid-1970s.
Lagniappe: St. Paul, Minnesota, started out as Pig’s Eye.
I think it’s The Four Tops, though I know some folks say it’s Neil Diamond. In any event, that’s the original version of Istanbul, which TMBG did a cover of.
Still is, actually. Or at least, the parts of it that ever were Ohio City in the first place. It’s a neighborhood now, rather than an independent city, but every Clevelander will know exactly what you mean when you say “Ohio City”.
Uh, thanks fot the New York info, but you guys are not quite getting it, I know already about the four tops but what I am talking about is a comedy routine circa 1950 that was NOT a song. AFAICR the sketch was about two guys running into a know-it-all ticket seller (in a train station?) and it definitely had the “nobody’s business but the Turks” line. My theory is that the singers were inspired by that comedy bit to create the original song.
Cairo has had a lot of names. Accordinfg to Sir Richard Burton, one of these was Bab-al-Yun, which caused a lot of confusion for Westerners, especially during the Crusades, since they confused it with “Babylon”, that seat of Evil.
