In the 19th century, when the British Empire went around the world, they introduced the alphabet and writing to people who used other scripts, if any.
So, they said to the local yokels, "How do you say that again?" and the local yokel would say "Krakatau or Krakatoa or Krackertao or some such". The English scribes would do their best to convert what they heard to an English script in a consistent way.
Then, over a century, linguistic drift took place and now people are wanting to change the spelling of Bombay to Mumbai and Peking to Beijing. In NZ the mispronunciation sounds where wh is now pronounced plain f, which it would have been written if that was how it sounded. It was more like phew or when than fen.
Bombay was obviously how it sounded back then. Same for Peking. That's my theory anyway.
This isn't splitting hairs, because when somebody bombs somewhere, we don't want some CIA analyst thinking they've found the right place, giving the wrong GPS co-ordinates to targeting central only to blow up a women's refuge centre instead of Islamic Jihad HQ.
Also, Google searches will become impossible when all sorts of weird spellings of the same word are used. Fortunately, Google often says "did you mean ... " and sure enough, I did.
Mqurice |
