Alternative place names

Vadim Vygonets vadik at cs.huji.ac.il
Tue Sep 26 08:59:13 UTC 2000


Quoth Paul Eggert on Tue, Sep 26, 2000:
> Oscar van Vlijmen <o.van.vlijmen at tip.nl> writes:
> > * China: Chungking: seems to me an old and wrong French transliteration of
> > Chongqing; the q is not a k-sound, but a ts-sound.

In Mandarin, it sounds more like 'ch' to me.

> Chungking is the traditional English name;

> (Postal)        (Pinyin)
> Chungking       Chongqing

> "Chungking" is somewhere in the middle -- still more popular than the
> Pinyin name in movie titles (e.g. Chungking Express [1994], a movie
> made in Hong Kong) but less popular in, say, English-language travel
> web sites produced in the PRC.  For now I'm slightly inclined to leave
> it as "Chungking" for a little while longer, but put "Chongqing" in as
> a comment.  Similarly for the other Postal names.

I just asked a Chinese guy, who says that Chongqing is the
official transliteration used in China.  So maybe we should go
with the Chinese government.

> Szechuan        Sichuan

Szechuan is food, not place.

> > * Kirgizstan: should be Kyrgyzstan.
> 
> The official name indeed has "y" but I think "i" is quite popular in
> English.

'i' and 'y' are different sounds, at least in Russian.  Kirgizia
and Kirgizstan are Russian names, Kyrgyzstan is Kyrgyzian
(Kirgizian?).

> > * Turkmenistan has since 1991 the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic.
> > I'm not sure if it's Ashkhabad or Ashgabat at the moment.
> 
> Altavista says that Ashgabat is much more common, and the CIA uses
> Ashgabat.  This looks like we should change the name too.

Yes, probably.  It's Turkmenian name.

> Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon is far more populous than Hanoi, so that's
> why we use it.  (Just as we use Los Angeles and not Sacramento.  :-)

However, Asia/Jerusalem and not Asia/Tel_Aviv is the official
time zone for Israel.

Vadik.

-- 
Avoid reality at all costs.



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