Paul Brown' Guardian
Many of us feel confused because of the changes introduced in recent years in the names of countries, cities, mountains and rivers around the world. The names of various sites in the world have been changed so many times that postal services, search and rescue workers, tourists and public transport companies have difficulty coping with the situation. The problem seems to be troubling the United Nations as well, which has decided to take action: next year two guidebooks will be published on the question of how to unify names, so that places can once again be found in a world of spreading globalization.
The most prominent and well-known examples showing the need for the science of place names is the changing of the name of the Indian city Bombay to Mumbai, and the name of the Chinese capital Peking to Beijing (in Chinese the name means the capital of the north). Both cities have recently returned to the names they had in the pre-colonial period. In Africa and India too local names are being re-adopted to get rid of colonial vestiges. The problem was exacerbated after the collapse of the USSR; many countries changed the names of their cities to return to the original names from the pre-Soviet era.
According to David Munro, director of the Scottish "Royal Geographical Society", who chairs a committee on the names used by Great Britain, the goal of the UN is to keep up with the changes, so that everyone knows exactly where different places are located. "This is important for several reasons," he explains. "For example, when aid agencies want to send help. If they are not sure where a certain place is located - how can they get the food to the right people?"
The British Ministry of Defense employs three people at the Royal Geographical Society in London to keep abreast of name changes around the world. This has a dual use. One, to prevent the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from getting into a diplomatic embarrassment by using the "old" name. The second is to make sure that people working in places like the Ministry of Defense and the British Intelligence and Security Services are up-to-date on the names that terrorists or political groups might use in their language. In the first Gulf War it already happened that planes bombed the wrong places because of name confusion.
Naming places is a political decision, which can sometimes turn out to be dangerous. The self-proclaimed Republic of Macedonia, formerly part of Yugoslavia, found itself close to war with neighboring Greece over the new name it adopted for itself. Greece feared that the Macedonian Republic would try to annex the Northern Treaty, which is also called Macedonia. Officially, the UN calls the country the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia", or the acronym of this name in English: FYROM. But even the UN Committee of Experts on Names, whose chair is Helen Karput, admits that no one in Macedonia uses this name .
There is also no shortage of confusion, caused by several names denoting the same place. For example, the city known as Jerusalem in English is known as Jerusalem in Hebrew and Jerusalem and Al-Quds in Arabic. All four versions are now starting to appear on maps to avoid confusion. In countries like South Africa where 11 official languages are spoken, the situation is even more problematic. The city known as Cape Town in English is Capestead in the Afrikaner (Boer) language, and in the Xhosa language its name is Ekapa (eKapa). The government is still debating how to handle the issue.
Another, perhaps smaller, problem is the changing of the spelling and pronunciation of places to reflect the true origins of anglicized names. For example, the name of the capital of Uzbekistan, Tashkent, was changed to Tushkant, and the name of Samarkand, which lies on the Silk Road to China, continued as before, but the spelling changed from Samarkand to Samarqand.
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