Alternative place names

Antoine Leca Antoine.Leca at renault.fr
Tue Sep 26 09:56:03 UTC 2000


Oscar van Vlijmen wrote:
> 
> * Cambodia: Phnom Penh says the tz data, Phnum Penh is a more modern
> transliteration.

Translitteration has nothing to do here (furthermore, it depends of 
the standard you are referring to, for my side I did not see of a
widely accepted standard for the Khmer script).

Names are the English ones; this calls for transcription rather than
translitteration. And furthermore, the common usage (the layman point
of view) rather than the scientific one.


> * China: Chungking: seems to me an old and wrong French transliteration of
> Chongqing; the q is not a k-sound, but a ts-sound.

FWIW: none of them in my (not recent) dictionnary. Furthermore, as
far as French is concerned, if the initial is an affricate, then the
real "old and wrong French" name looks more like Tch'... something.

BTW, there is a 3M inhabitants (in Sichuan) city whose traditional French
name is Tchong-K'ing.. (Chongqing in pinyin will correspond to 
Tch'ong-k'ing in EFEO, so I wonder if it the same place...
BTW, EFEO have both k' and ts' to transcribe pinyin q, so I do not
know what the real prononciation is, and if it varies according to
the place).


Antoine



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