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Portuguese people were among the first europeans to live in bombay. they named it "bom baim" which in portuguese meant good little bay. this city grew up as one of the major ports and trading center in india. from portuguese it went to British hands and they started calling it Bombay. India got independent in 1947 and it took local politicians -marathi people are prominent in maharashtra state where bombay is- about 50 years to change the name to Mumbai. Local koli community has a famous temple of mumbadevi at Bombay and mumba coupled with aai which means mother in marathi language resulted in city called Mumbai. Whichever political power rules the city changes the names accordingly to please their voters. In india Madras go changed to Chennai, Baroda to Vadodara, Poona to Pune, Calcutta to Kolkata.
Quote:
Originally Posted by goldengrain
Why is Bombay now Mumbai?
and
Rome, on travel maps, is called Civitavecchia, what is this all about?
I think the Mumbai issue is that the British mispronounced it as Bombay, but I am not sure.
Rome, on travel maps, is called Civitavecchia, what is this all about?
Civitaveccia is the port city for Rome and is about an hour's drive away. If you're on a cruise ship for instance, the itinerary might read Civitaveccia with Rome in parentheses like this: Civitaveccia (Rome).
I have a philosophical problem with names of foreign places.
English usage has somewhat arbitrarily ordered that we can start Iceland with a long-I, but not Iran or Iraq, and saying Eye-ran or Eye-raq has become the mark of a hillbilly. And then Don Rumsfeld's silly insistence on Qatar being pronounced "Gutter" by the news media, because he heard some dignitary say that, but he didn't care if people said Jordan instead of Urdunn, or Syria instead of Suriya, or Lebanon instead of Liban. And I don't remember hearing Rumsfeld being careful to say May-hee-co or Frawnce.
And then Ivory Coast's insistence that Americans call their country by its French name instead of English.
By the way, all our English respelling of European countries and their major cities is the fault of the English, and places that came into existence or prominence after the British heyday of diplomacy now usually have their native spellings preserved in English usage, along with a fairly valiant attempt at the pronunciation.
> Civitaveccia is the port city for Rome and is about an hour's drive away.
Exactly. If you are taking a cruise and planning to actually get to Rome, you should carefully investigate how practical it really is. In this case they really are different places.
The Italian names are generally very similar (Rome = Roma, etc.)
I would add that the changing names of Indian cities in the last 15 years was not just the desire to escape European imperialism, but part of a project by the ruling Hindu-nationalist party, the BJP, to make these cities uniquely Hindu (non-European, as well as non-Muslim). There are contemporary national political issues (Hindu vs. Muslim, right vs. left) that are potentially more important than the Europe vs. India issue of the past.
Portuguese people were among the first europeans to live in bombay. they named it "bom baim" which in portuguese meant good little bay. this city grew up as one of the major ports and trading center in india. from portuguese it went to British hands and they started calling it Bombay. India got independent in 1947 and it took local politicians -marathi people are prominent in maharashtra state where bombay is- about 50 years to change the name to Mumbai. Local koli community has a famous temple of mumbadevi at Bombay and mumba coupled with aai which means mother in marathi language resulted in city called Mumbai. Whichever political power rules the city changes the names accordingly to please their voters. In india Madras go changed to Chennai, Baroda to Vadodara, Poona to Pune, Calcutta to Kolkata.
> Civitaveccia is the port city for Rome and is about an hour's drive away.
Exactly. If you are taking a cruise and planning to actually get to Rome, you should carefully investigate how practical it really is. In this case they really are different places.
The Italian names are generally very similar (Rome = Roma, etc.)
I, lazy thing that I am, finally got around to googling Civitaveccia. It means 'Old City'. I suppose that does not mean it's where the ruins are.
I think the best way of seeing Rome is through a multiple day tour. It seems as though all the tourist cities hike prices up really high for tourists, even those of Italian descent, and a regular tour can probably get a better deal than a couple traveling alone.
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