Why is Beijing not shown as Peking, since the other cities whose name in English has changed, such as Bombay, Calcutta, Constantinople, show the old name?
I wonder if this makes sense. Peking hasn't changed its name to Beijing, we've just now got a better transliteration of the name into English. It was as much Beijing in 1850 as it is now. I agree with using Ezo instead of Tokyo, because that is a case where the name has actually changed since then.
200 years ago, China's position on the world stage was more heavily influenced by the Cantonese ports (Guangzhou and Hong Kong), and so the name of the city was transliterated from the Cantonese instead of the Mandarin. I think it's the answer that should be displayed, as it was the standard spelling at the time.
My vote is for Peking, Canton, Hangchow and Soochow (as I prefer these names, their spellings and the way they sound in English, and also because this was how they were written then).
I don't see how it's relevant that 200 years ago English speakers wrote the names of cities wrong. It's not what people in those cities ever called it and not what informed people know them as today. I think the older romanizations should be accepted as correct, but it's ahistorical to pretend that just because white people were wrong about their names 200 years ago that their names have changed. Canton is a corruption of Guangdong, the name of the province, pronounced the same in Cantonese as in Mandarin. The city had always (since long before Europeans went there) been called Guangzhou, with a very similar pronunciation in Cantonese.
As a side note, I think this is a typo in Plattitude's comment, but Tokyo was never known as Ezo. That was the name for Ainu country in northern Honshu and Hokkaido before and during Japanese colonization. Tokyo was called Edo, and before that Yedo. Yedo was the more common spelling in English since it was still pronounced this way in the 17th century.
Chinese place names were converted into English and other European languages by romanisation for centuries until the 1980s, so Běi Jīng was translated by the Roman alphabet into Peking, kʷɔ̌ːŋ.tsɐ̂u̯ (Cantonese pronunciation) was translated to Kwangchow (or anglicised to Canton). I wouldn't exactly say these transliterations were wrong. Many European city names are also translated vastly differently many different European languages, e.g Vienna/Wien/Vienne/Wenen/Viena/Wiedeń; Paris/Parijs/Parigi/Pariisi.
All Chinese cities "updated" there names when pinyin was adopted as the official method of romanisation for mainland China, so even tiny villages have different names now when written in English.
Some time in the last twenty years we passed the threshold in which more than half of the world population lives in cities. In 1850, by contrast, only England (but not the U.K.) and some other European countries were that urbanized; we did not cross that line in the U.S. until about 100 years ago.
Got everything except Glasgow. Having taken my biggest cities in 1950/1900/1800/1500/1000/100 quiz multiple times helped a lot. Mostly the same answers.
No offense, but if we're doing historical names from 1850, then shouldn't Constantinople be Istanbul? Unless people were still referring to it as Constantinople at the time, in spite of the Turkish renaming of the city about 400 years earlier
"Konstantiniyye," the Turkish transliteration of Constantinople was used by the Ottomans until their decimation in WW1. Ataturk later standardized Latin Turkish names for all their cities.
Hangchow and Soochow are both essentially the same development as Shanghai - they are literally all right next to each other - not 100 or even dozens of miles apart. They are literally right next to each other.
As a side note, I think this is a typo in Plattitude's comment, but Tokyo was never known as Ezo. That was the name for Ainu country in northern Honshu and Hokkaido before and during Japanese colonization. Tokyo was called Edo, and before that Yedo. Yedo was the more common spelling in English since it was still pronounced this way in the 17th century.
Thanks.
Very Surprising
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