How did the British get “Bombay” out of “Mumbai”?
They teleported him from Chennai to Madras.
They got it out of Hindi “Bombai”. But the locals (who mostly don’t speak Hindi) didn’t like that, and insisted on the change, back in the last years of the 20th century.
Thanks.
Many folks from New Orleans pronounce it “Nawlins.”
Yeah, they also speak a thing that got singed in a plate of poutine, pecked at by a loon, dragged down the big muddy, chewed on and shit out by an alligator, carried around for a while by a pelican before being beaten senseless by the Red Stick, and they have the gaul to attach to it the name of the thing that is spoken in France.
Around here most people now pronounce it Bayjing – in the belief that an odd English mis-pronunciation is more appropriate than a Shanghai pronunciation?
But restaurants (“Peking Land”) and restaurant menus still retain the traditional Englsh name: “Peking Duck”. 
Because it comes from Latin (i.e., the Catholic church) “scedula”, which was pronounced as a “sh”.
How and why both it and “school” (from the Latin “scola”) came to acquire an “h” in English spelling is another question.
A lot of the other examples are simply explained as contractions/elisions over the centuries when spelling and writing were far less important (and no more consistent) than verbal communication.
Reminds me of the possibly apocryphal story about Pipeline Beach in Hawaii, named for an underground pipeline as well as the classic shape of its waves, but sometimes pronounced by visitors as “pee-pay-lee-nay”.
And if you are helping someone move you may rent a “Oo-ha-ool” truck.
Hi, I’d like to rent a moving van. From? From Pocatello. Yeah, to Lahaina.
Ah, Americans - the people who like my ‘accent’. All joking aside, English (especially as it is used in the UK) can be tricksy because of the variety of origins and influences on a word. When it comes to place names, local convention trumps linguistic consistency every time.
For instance, I live in a town which is situated on the river Aln. That’s pronounced just the way it looks. Fine so far. But my town is called Alnwick. Is it pronounced aln-wick? Of course not. It’s ah-nick. The next town down is called Alnmouth (it’s at the mouth of the river Aln). So is it aln-mouth or an-mouth? And that’s forgetting the British convention of unstressing and quickening the final vowel - aln-mith. But no, everyone pronounces it alan-mouth. These towns are three miles apart.
British English, when it was Old English, was basically a West Germanic language. When the Normans invaded, they brought French with them. The Latin in English almost exclusively comes from the adoption of French words into English. But of course there were local influences and dialects. Living here (ah-nick), on the border between England and Scotland I can detect Pictish and Gaelic influences on words and pronunciations, just as much as French and German. And the local accent tends to be one of the purer pronunciations of Old English. Throw some classical Greek into the mix and add a dash of loan-words from various foreign languages (schadenfreude anyone?) and you end up with ‘English as she is spoke’. One may find the pronunciation of Edinburgh odd when coming from a culture that was influenced by German and Dutch, but not so much when coming from one with Old English at its core.
Much as I decry our former colonial cousins and their horrendous pronunciation of a perfectly good (if ridiculously complicated) language, times change, language evolves and dialects vary. Given the many different cultures from which the American settlers derived, it’s hardly surprising that there are linguistic differences with the ‘old country’.
But don’t fret, America. British pronunciation is getting eroded by our constant exposure to US media and the internet. I barely hear anyone pronounce schedule correctly any more. Nine times out of ten, I hear sked-yool these days - instead of shed-yoo-ill. No one pronounces mall as ma-ll any more, it’s always moll - except for the street in London known as Pall Mall (that’s still pal ma-ll). And now that will seem like a weird pronunciation because we’ve strayed for our linguistic roots.
I’m staying well away from the Chinese stuff. There are over fifty extant Chinese languages and my (Taiwanese) wife speaks three of them. We speak a horrendous and impenetrable mix of English, Mandarin, Min nan hua and Japanese in my house.
Oh and for the guy who asked if the British aristocracy tend to speak French - yes. For a long time (and even now) the default foreign language taught in the UK tends to be French. And as most of the aristocracy are of French descent, most of them have stuck to French pronunciations of their names and the like. What strikes me as particularly ironic is that so often in American English, the stresses are placed in the French manner, yet any American I’ve heard speaking French mangles the pronunciation and stresses to the point of hilarity. Case in point - garage. In Britain, that’s ga-ridge. In the US, it’s ga-raj (same as the French). But hearing an American trying to pronounce the French, it oddly devolves into a mess.
One final thing. For those of us with an aristocratic background and a classical education, there are certain tiny linguistic pointers that betray one’s upbringing. How do you say “suit”? Soot? That’s how just about everyone in the UK and US pronounces it. But for us posh folk, it’s actually syoot - with an almost imperceptible ‘y’ sound in there. Listen out for it the next time you encounter someone who claims to come from a British aristocratic background.
I thought Pall Mall was pronounced “Pell Mell”.
Neither. The correct pronunciation ends in a vowel, which neither of those do 
/kixote/
Portuguese actually.
Back when there were candy cigarettes in American convenience stores, some packets had parody names like “Untrue” or “Marble-O”. One of the parody names was “Pell Mell”, because Americans pronounce the cigarette name as “Paul Maul”, but still have a phrase pronounced and spelled “Pell Mell” to describe a hectic situation. It found that funny once I found out the British pronunciation since the cigarette’s name would be pronounced “Pell Mell” originally, making a parody impossible.
Milngavie (Mil-guy) isn’t so bad. The real buggers are anything where you see a Z, such as Finzean (Fing-en) and Menzies (Ming-iss).
It’s down to the middle english/older scots letter yogh, which became conflated with Z with the rise of printing.
Yet at least once, Menzies was actually men-zeez, as in the former retail chain - though I think that was stylistic rather than traditional.
Pall Mall cigarettes were names after the London street, so are properly pronounced pahl mahl, but were often pronounced as pell mell - just like that phrase.
Oh, British names, they are fun.
Colonial vindication!
They got it from Portuguese Bom Bahia. “Mumbai” is the Marathi version of Bom Bahia, not the other way around.
This is wrong in at least two levels.
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The original name was Bom Bahia, and it was named by the Portuguese. Both English Bombay and Marathi Mumbai are derived from Bom Bahia
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Bombay is a polyglot city with Hindi, English, Gujarati, and many other languages spoken. Everyone speaks Hindi, or at least Bambaiya Hindi. Even Marathi speakers speak Hindi. It’s the state government of Maharashtra, which is dominated by Marathi nationalists, which forced the name change. The people of the city still freely use the name Bombay.