From: Patrick Andries (Patrick.Andries@xcential.com)
Date: Tue Jul 06 2004 - 06:45:58 CDT
Peter Kirk a écrit :
> On 03/07/2004 00:07, Patrick Andries wrote:
>
>> o very different political realities (before and after 1453). Cities
>> change names without going through transliterattions, cf. Berlin
>> (Ontario) becoming Kitchener in 1916.
>>
>>
>
> But Constantinople -> Istanbul is not in fact this kind of name
> change, for Istanbul (that is, İstanbul) is probably a corrupted and
> shortened version of Constantinople, with the initial I added to fit
> Turkish phonology (cf. the old western version Stamboul, still used in
> Russian, also Smyrna -> Izmir). (I have also heard it said that
> Istanbul comes from Greek EIS TĒN POLIN "to the city", but that seems
> less likely to me.)
Yes, I have heard this.
> So the change is more like Beijing -> Peking than Berlin -> Kitchener.
Without a political change Constantinople would not have changed name in
a matter of days (at least as far as the officials were concerned). In
any case, it is not a transliteration problem (Beijing --> Pékin).
P. A.
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