I Left My Heart in St. Francis

Why do we write “Vienna,” and not “Wien”; and yet we have switched “Peking” to “Beijing”?

Okay, you may not care. But I am, among other things, a professional editor.

It is a puzzlement. The proper rule is this: if a place name has an established spelling in English, that spelling is authoritative. How the people who actually live there, who speak a different language, say it in their language, is not relevant. This is the same rule followed by other languages: the French say “Londres,” not “London.”

The English name for a number of Indian cities has also changed: Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai, Poona to Pune, and so forth. But this is defensible: a significant number of people living in those places speak English, and their usage therefore arguably changes English usage.

But what is the argument for changing “Peking” to “Beijing”? Or, to cite other recent examples, “Burma” to “Myanmar,” “Ivory Coast” to “Cote d’Ivoire,” “Congo” to “Zaire,” “Saigon” to “Ho Chi Minh City,” or “Cambodia” to “Kampuchea”?

What do all these examples have in common? (Other than most of them having been changed back a few years later, adding to everyone’s confusion.) Hint: think left-wing dictatorships.

The chattering classes in the West are too ready to bend over, frontwards or backwards, for any leftist dictatorship in the Third World.

And have been for some while. English-language publications generally also swallowed St. Petersberg to Petrograd to Leningrad, in its day.