Mumbai or Bombay?

The tragic news from India has had the side effect of bringing to light the question of the city's name - Mumbai or Bombay? And it's one that has left media organisations scratching their heads.

Invariably a lot of people are going to jump out and assert that the city's "official English name" is "Bombay", perhaps with something about us not calling the Italian capital "Roma" and maybe claims that language can't be changed. But a language is a dynamic thing, with usage prone to changing. And can't an entity change its name if it wishes? When Reginald Kenneth Dwight choose to change his name, didn't he become Elton Hercules John immediately? Or did some vague entity who makes "official" statements about the English language (there isn't one) have to declare the name had changed before the new one could be used?

So for all the controversial background to it, the name "Mumbai" is now used in English for this city. And also in my experience the city is not normally talked about much at all in the UK. So it's harder to make assertions about what regular usage is, although in my personal experience virtually every relevant conversation I've had in recent years has used "Mumbai".

"But we say 'Bombay duck' and 'Bollywood'" I hear people cry. This is true, but then the use of "Beijing" has not wiped out "Peking duck" has it? At the end of the day usage can change and change can be encouraged. And in this case the drive to us "Mumbai" has largely succeeded.

And of course now that a lot of media outlets are calling it "Mumbai", that's the term dominating search engines. So news websites still using "Bombay" are finding they're losing potential traffic.

See also meditations71: Bombay or Mumbai?, The English Blog: Words in the News: Bombay or Mumbai, Matt's Geography Blog: Mumbai Was Bombay and The Guardian: Bombay or Mumbai? How UK media outlets are finally moving with the times for other takes on this issue.

On the plural of "referendum"

I've just seen Gordon Brown giving an interview on the Politics Show and when talking about not the people have their say on the EU Constitution"Treaty" he said "referendums" and then rapidly "or I should say 'referenda'".

Why is this hyperforeignism pluralisation perpetuated? Not only is it inconsistent - we don't use the Inuit pluralisation for "anorak" for a start - but it's also not necessary. The most correct plural form is "referendums" and this is reflected in legislation - see the Referendums (Scotland and Wales) Act 1997 and Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. This is becoming one of those issues on which pedants are making a fuss in favour of the wrong form!

(P.S. My blog spellcheck still doesn't recognise "referenda" but has no problem with "referendums".)

Does English need a spelling reform?

Recently two incidents have left me wondering about this one.

Earlier this week I received back a copy of a thesis chapter from my supervisor and amongst the howlers in it he pointed out that I'd used the spelling "practice" when it should be "practise" for the verb. Since the noun uses the latter form, and Americans use both (and Microsoft's "UK English" spellchecker doesn't flag it as an error), it's an easy mistake to make. But both spellings are pronounced the same, are derived from the same root and so forth. Why exactly they're spelt differently is a mystery.

Another point came in reading a few pieces about the current general election in Australia where I was reminded that the Australian Labor Party uses that spelling despite ~our spellings being standard in Australia (including for "labour") because nearly a century ago one of the leading Labor politicians was an advocate of spelling who opted to "modernise" the name, only for the great spelling reform to not happen. (See Wikipedia: Australian Labor Party#History and King O'Malley.)

Spelling reform seeks to make a language easier to spell, removing irregular spellings and making spelling phonetic (now why isn't that word spelt the way it's pronounced?). Is this a pointless goal or could it bring greater benefits? Could it really reduce levels of dyslexia (another difficult to spell word) as some of its advocates claim?

In one area spelling reform happens all the time. As foreign words get incorporated into English very often they lose accents (e.g. rôle becoming role or élite becoming elite) even when there already conventions for how to type them without accents (e.g. without an umlaut "Führer" should be rendered "Fuehrer" and strictly not "Fuhrer"). Another change, although one that frequently provokes howls of pedants and protests, is when the English rules of pluralisation are followed - so it's "forums" not "fora" and "referendums" nor "referenda" (and the Blogspot spellcheck has just flagged the latter as an unfamiliar word). I have never understood why the Latin rules of pluralisation should be adhered to for words used in English, unless it's because some people want to show off that they know the language.

But overall English is a very complicated language to understand, and the international variations compound the problem further. Now as time goes on it's possible that some of the spellings will start to regularise naturally, but it would take millenniums to occur. Would a concerted effort help? And would it be possible to implement? (Just look at how much resistance to metrication in the UK, and the US is even worse on that one.) The German spelling reform of 1996 has been particularly controversial, but it's not yet possible to see if it has helped literacy rates.

Still we can at least try to ensure that only English plurals are used.