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Christopher Hitchens has started a campaign to call Mumbai Bombay again, generating responses from Ezra Klein , Tim Fernholz, Isaac Chotiner, DJW and others. The debate surrounds the history of colonialism and religious intolerance prompting Jim Henley to note, via a Google Reader comment, “Fellow doesn’t get that the imperialism part is where he assume it’s his business one way or the other.”
There is that.
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The argument is a little different, DCL. When the city was built it was called “Saint Petersburg” and it remained that way for a couple of hundred years. The Bolsheviks changed it to Leningrad. After the USSR collapsed the Russians changed it back.
The city in India had never been called “Mumbai” except in the imaginations of a few nationalists. Bombay comes from the Portuguese for a “good port”.
I see no particular reason for English speakers to try to call foreign places by the names the people who live there use when we’ve got accepted English names for them. Otherwise we’d be saying “Sankt Pehtehrsboorg” (to use the example above), “Paree”, and “Roma”.
I’ve been calling it Mumbai the last week or so but had previously called it Bombay mostly on the grounds that I think it’s silly to keep changing the names of well-established places.
That pretty much nails it. Or, looking at it another way, we don’t call other cities by their local names.
The argument is a little different, DCL. When the city was built it was called “Saint Petersburg†and it remained that way for a couple of hundred years. The Bolsheviks changed it to Leningrad. After the USSR collapsed the Russians changed it back.
The city in India had never been called “Mumbai†except in the imaginations of a few nationalists. Bombay comes from the Portuguese for a “good portâ€.
You’ve actually come across the best solution, which is to use “St. Petersburg” and “Bombay” so that Sympathy For The Devil still makes sense.
