Portugal's capital didn't change it's name. Al-Usbuna is just a phonetic adaptation (to Arabic) of its previous name, Olissipona, itself derived from Olissipo . And in 1147 it didn't change to Lisbon. Lisbon is the English name, in Portuguese it's Lisboa. But all those versions (as well as Lisbona, Lissabona, Lissabon) are not name changes, but adaptations to different languages (like London in French, Spanish and Portuguese is Londres).
I didn't knew about this history but, since i'm brazilian, it was obvious that Al-Usbuna and Lisboa are related. It is like he just read it on a list and decided to include without further research
Instresting in my country people dont associate it with the capital but more our big cities of Sydney n Melbourne but fun fact canberra our capital was made because Sydney n Melbourne both wanted to be the capital when we became a country but they did the parent dealing with kids fighting thing none of you will be and decided on Canberra half way between the 2 lol
Beijing ("Northern Capital") was once confusingly named Nanjing ("Southern Capital") as one of the capitals of Liao dynasty, and it made sense cuz it was to the south of the other capital Shangjing ("Upper Capital")
@@AvrahamYairStern The Liao dynasty did not control the Nanjing that is modern Nanjing. But Beijing was their souther capital so it got the name 南京 anyway.
End Tokyo is called "eastern Capital". While it sounds different, because it's in a different language, it still uses the same character: 京 for Kyo / Jing
2:54 Another good reason for the name change is also the fact that King Leopold II of Belgium is viewed negatively because of his enslavement of the Congolese when it was then known as Congo Free State.
Al-Usbuna? Drop the As on each end and add a vowel shift: it's the same name. Al-Usbuna -> Lusbun -> Lisbon This reminds me of the progression of L'viv: Lemburg to Lew Vov to L'vov (vov being equivalent to burg and Lew being the Polish equivalent of the German Lem) then to Lviv
Baile Átha Cliath is the official name for Dublin in Irish. This name comes from one of the 3 original Viking settlements. One of the other settlements was called Dubh Linn which then changed into Dublin. Also, Baile Átha Cliath is pronounced Bol-ya Awe-ha Clee-ah.
I don't think the examples of Greenland and Ireland are really name changes, as *both* names are official. But they may have changed which of the two is the "most" official.
As far as I remember, Dublin was founded by Normans with this (Normannish) name, and the name Baile Atha Cliath was given to it by the Irish, but both names are official names today.
Being a linguistic channel you should really learn how to pronounce the capitals in the local language. I stopped counting but you massacred a lot of names. You kept adding letters where they weren't. For example Astana not Astanta, or Bishkek not Bishbek. Ribnica is pronounced Ribnitza not ribinica
Like it's not so difficult, I understand there are very difficult and strange languages and you can't do an exhaustive linguistic research just to mention it in the video, but... In well-known languages like Spanish, French or whatever??? And even if you just pronounce everything as written in English: is really so difficult to pronounce a word without inserting imaginary letters??? It almost seems like if every name was written in ambiguous hieroglyphs he has to guess while reading... In the case of Lourenço Marques, Ç is a letter even some English words like "façade" have, what's wrong there? I really can't understand what's the problem of name explain with pronouncing names
You missed out on Bolivia's capital, it has had a total of 4 names throughout its history. Originally it was known as Charcas, which later on changed to La Plata and then Chuquisaca. Nowadays it's known as Sucre, the City of Four Names.
As an Irishman, I can confirm that Baile Átha Cliath is just the Irish name for Dublin (I know the origin of "Dublin", but I don't want to rob you of a name to explain), it was always called Dublin (it wasn't always the capital though, and according to Corkonians like myself, it still isn't, we call Cork "the real capital")
@@waynemarvin5661 I've been watching Patrick's videos for a long time, and I've alwayd been excited to find out new things about names, geography, countries/cities, etc.
Baile Átha Cliath is the name of the original Gaelic settlement, north of the river Liffey, near the Four Courts. Dublin is the name of the Norse (Viking) settlement and trading post established around 1000 BC south of the river. I’ll let Patrick work out the origin of these names, and which local geographical features they were named after (and which English city shares its name with Dublin).
@@noelleggett5368 There is also a suburb in Cork with that name (that of that English city), though we pronounce it with the stress on the last syllable (think "record" as a noun vs "record" as a verb)
Being such a large RUclipsr, it shouldn't be too hard for you to find help from your followers when pronouncing foreign names; it is a small detail, but it would go a long way to make your channel look more professional. I can forgive more obscure non-european languages, but I would assume British people have at least a certain understanding of how French and Spanish are supposed to sound like. I don't expect you to sound native-like, but even close enough would be highly appreciated.
Like even looking a city in Wikipedia most often gives you the pronounciation, I can't get what this man is doing to pronounce everything so wrongly...
I've said it in another comment, but I'll repeat it here: we -the audience- must press on or otherwise convince him to at least bother to pronounce those names half-decent.
@@mfaizsyahmi voting with wallet, that's definitely a valid way to convince him. yeah, that patreon section at the beginning of his video has been getting on my nerves. just another example of relying too much on youtube as a career.
And that's even an easy to see one, Alusbuna - Lisbon, yeah, nothing alike. The day this man has to explain a name like Seville going like Hispalis > Ishbiliya > Sevilla instead of radically changing its name to another randomly his brain will explode
I'm not Korean, but can pronounce the language rather well thanks to almost 4 years of Kpop fandom. And the "eo" in the Korean names aren't pronounced like in English, but as a single vowel that's kinda like a cross between an o and a schwa. And for that matter, "eu" is pronounced by unrounding your lips while saying "oo" (basically, it's the "ı" vowel in my native Turkish) and "ae", while having a more obvious pronounciation, is still a single vowel. Hope this helps.
A few small corrections to the part about Oslo (where I live), you missed the last "i" in "Christiania" and when you say old Oslo used to be in "a completely different location" I think most people hearing it will think it moved a significant distance (which it really didn't) - the city center was relocated after a devastating fire in 1624 but was moved little more than a kilometer and the old town was soon incorporated back into the city, today old town lies within the borough descriptively named "old Oslo" (one of Oslo's 15 boroughs) and it'll take you just north of 10 minutes to walk there from the central train station.
You should run your city names through a text to speech application (like the Google translate audio button) to see the correct pronunciations so you won't mispronounce all the time.
The name Otto was not given to the city of Ottawa, it was renamed after the Ottawa river that itself got its name from the algonquin word "Odawa", to trade. -wikipedia Locals today still pronounce it as odawa as we rarely enunciate the double 't'
In Romanised Lao TH is an aspirated T and PH is an aspirated P, as commonly used in English. Lao has a non-aspirated T and P sound which is not present in English and is Romanised without the H. You did a better job pronouncing Vientiane than a lot of foreigners do, so well done there. The only thing I'd mention is that the V sounds like a W. These same spellings are used for Romanised Thai as well. As a side note, and for future reference, Romanised Burmese uses HT for an aspirated T and TH for the same TH sound we use in the word "thanks" in English.
I'm no native English speaker so I never aspirate any letter except when reading ancient Greek who has both kind of sounds, whoever although it doesn't make any difference in English they actually use both aspirated and unaspirated consonants, it just depends where they are located in the word
Iirc, Neacșu's letter, the oldest document in Romanian, refers to Istanbul as Țarigrad (Istanbul itself had also been called Constantinople and Byzantium previously)
Heijo is the name for Pyongyang when it was under Japanese occupation. Japanese does not have a romanisation based on Spanish sounds, rather English, Heijo is pronounced like saying hey joe! rather than heyho
Missed out India .... Delhi has had many names The name "Indraprastha" is believed to be a 5000 year old name of the city and from that it has changed many times as well ! anyways ... Great video!! :)
Budapest of Hungary used to be 2 cities, Buda and Pest on opposite sides of the Danube river (Buda being the capital with the castle, but Pest having the bigger population due to its flat terrority). In 1873 after multiple bridges had conntected the cities for a while, it made sense to unite them into... Pest-Buda which stayed for like one year before they realized it's way too annoying to pronounce so they swapped it to Budapest.
I think this video might be making a mistake. Should a city that changed country count as changing name when they are conquered/ceded? It seems strange...
Neither do cities which were rebuilt over or next to ancient settlements, nor that just stop using the colonial name to use the native name in their local language
Regarding Beijing, it actually did change its name from Beiping, and several others. There's literally a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to the names of Beijing. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Beijing
I the province of Ontario, where Ottawa is, up until 1916 we actually had *three* European capitals in the south-west part of the province, all along or at least near the Thames River. London and Paris are still there, but during WW I the citizens of Berlin decided to change the name to Kitchener, after Lord Kitchener.
Indonesian capital, Jakarta, also got some changes troughout its history. Oldest recorded name (at least from what I know) for the city was Sunda Kelapa, which was given by the ruler at the time, the Sunda Kingdom. Then it was conquered by Mataram Sultanate, it changed to Jayakarta (Victorious City). Then it was once again conquered by Dutch East Indies Company, burn to the ground, and on its ruins a new city was built and named Batavia. Then finally, in the end of 1940s, it was renamed Jakarta, which I suppose is a shorten version of Jayakarta.
In the Philippines, the Capital City of Manila are didn’t changed the name since the foundation in 1571 so mostly of the renaming places are Provincial Capital and Non-capital cities and municipalities
A similar topic for a video (though not exactly on-brand for Name Explain) would be nations that moved their capitals to a different city entirely, such as the U.S. changing its capital from Philadelphia to Washington.
Bratislava is the Slovakian name, Pozsony the Hungarian name, and Pressburg the German one, reflecting Bratislava's history as Slovakian town in the Kingdom of Hungary, which in turn was ruled by the German speaking Hapsburg dynasty. So it was not a renaming, there are three simultaneously used names for the same town. Hungarians still call the town Poszony, and in German maps, you find the name Pressburg.
1:31 Beijing did actually change its name when the Nationalist KMT government moved the capital to Nanjing; Beijing was called Peiping (Beiping depending on your transliteration) from 1928 to 1949. It was renamed Beijing after the Communists took over.
Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, has changed its name a lot in the past: - Tugu: the original settlement in what is now Tanjung Priok on 5th century, north of the city - Sunda Kelapa: the name of settlement a bit west of Tugu on 7-15th century, both now part of modern Jakarta - Jayakarta: when Sunda Kelapa fell to Fatahillah, he changed its name to Jayakarta, mean "victorious city" - Batavia: the Dutch razed Jayakarta to the ground and build the whole new settlement, named after Germanic tribe Batavi. The indigenous ethnic group Betawi is named after it. - Jakarta (Djakarta before 1972): phonetical adaptation of Jakarta, used again when Japanese colonized Indonesia. The name stays after independence.
Bogota, the capital of Colombia, was founded by the spanish as Santa Fe in 1539, then, the name was changed to Bogota in 1819, upon independence, and it was changed again in 1991 to Santa Fe de Bogota, but people didn't like it, so it was changed again in 2000 to the current official name, just Bogota.
And since it's Pozsony in Hungarian, the pronunciation would be Hungarian. His pronunciation spelled in Hungarian would be Poszoní, which isn't correct.
Oslo was Christiania NOT "Christiana" (never heard that name). And you mispronounced the name Godthåb in Greenland. What a blunder. Sorry, but this video is a total mess!
And the Slovakian city that was known as Pozsony was from the Hungarian name as far as I can tell. That pronunciation is therefore /poʒoɲ/, but he goes with /posoniː/, which isn't close. This pronunciation was very easy to find on Wiktionary. Being a channel about names, and not being able to pronounce them correctly despite there being easy to find sources, is just silly and lazy.
Dublin never stopped being called Baile Atha Cliath. If I was to speak to you in Irish that is how I would refer to my native city, as a side note it translates as 'City of the hurdles.'
Very interesting video, as always. A suggestion regarding pronunciation of South Slavic names: The letter ''c'' is pronounced as ''ts'', not as ''k'' or ''s''. So, it would be ''Podgoritsa'' in pronunciation. Other letter pronunciations include ''č'' and ''ć'' both being pronounced as ''ch'', ''š'' as ''sh'', ''ž'' as ''zh'', and both ''dž'' and ''đ'' as ''j'' in ''jar'', ''jazz'', or ''John''. Still, kudos for effort (as you deal with hundreds of languages).
And the Slovakian name which was in Hungarian, the "zs" is J like you gave examples of, and "ny" is the Spanish Ñ While working with a lot of languages is a reason why you won't always get the right pronunciation, the pronunciations for Pozsony and Godthåb (which he also mispronounced) are easily available on Wiktionary. If the names aren't on Wiktionary, or Wikipedia, I can excuse not pronouncing it correctly.
@@inceldestroyer1069 basically once the North Vietnamese captured the South and won the Vietnam War, the capital city title of the united country shifted to the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.
Bratislava is still called Pozsony today by Hungarian speakers. I assume the preceding names of Pressburg and Pozsony were universal + official because of Austro-Hungary. But the latter still remains alive today.
Anciently Korean was written with Chinese characters, although they didn't had the sound transliterated as "q" in chinese (I think is something like our "ch") they probably use a character which used it originally in chinese, like maybe meaning more a concept than a sound or whatever, not sure of how it worked anyway. Their script after created also had many letters just to write chinese sounds but they are no longer used. I've seen that people today in Korea may go like "what does your name mean?" And the other person writes his name in chinese characters and the other like "aaah, so Jokang means 'happiness', it's pretty"...
In Serbocroatian (for the Montenegrin names & if you do names from Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, & Montenegro in the future) the C is pronounced like a ts is in English like in tsar or bats
As montenegro has very similar language: Ribnica means probably just Fishtown. Podgorica means The town under the mountain. I notice, that even in Czech and other slavic languages we tend to like those a little bit dumb, self evident names. I am no exception, I like them too. :-D Another toppic for video maybe? :-)
You have a very specific pattern of mispronouncing names: you flip the syllables around. You read Kinshasa as Kinsasha and Trujilo as Trulijo (and then used an Eastern European pronunciation for the j, instead of Spanish) also you read Jahangir as Jaganhir Bishkek as Bishbek among other examples Hope that helps!
There's so many mispronunciations; one would think a channel called Name Explain would take extra care into making sure the names are correctly pronounced.
Puerto Rico was the name of the capital city of the island of San Juan Bautista.... It was later changed and now the island is named Puerto Rico, and the capital San Juan.
All for the better that Leopoldville had its name changed. Still burned in my memory after all these years was a picture in Life or Saturday Evening Post of the body of a white boy laying in the street of Leopoldville after a rebel attack The dead boy appeared to be about the same age as I was at the time--about 10.
Washing DC used to be called Columbia (from the C in DC) That’s actually why Washington state was named Washington and not Columbia the other suggested name. As it would’ve been confused with the capital which was called Columbia at the time. There was no official name change people just switched to Washington instead overtime
As far as I know, the city is called "Washington, D.C." like meaning the Washington city which is in the District of Columbia, while the district as distinct entity of the US is called just Columbia, not Washington, which is just a city inside it and it's capital. However, all the few other inhabited placed there ended merging with the city of Washington, which at the end came to occupy all the district territory and thus the name of the city now is used for the Columbia although legally and properly speaking aren't the same district since there is no longer difference. In Mexico is similar for example, Mexico City now is what in the formely called Federal District (was the same) were different cities, one of them being the original Mexico City, but then they all merged and became indistinguishable, now are each one like neighborhoods in the same city.
Bratislava has been called Pozsony (you butchered it, thank you very much) since 950 A.D, until 1920 when it was taken from Hungary by the treaty of Trianon. Pressburg is just the German name for it by the Austrians. If you want a former slavic name for it, it was called Prešporok until 1919. Come on man, that's just lazy research. (this took me 25 seconds to look up)
Lisbon didn't change its name. Al-Usbuna is the Arabic archaic form of the name Lisboa, both evolved from the greek-latin name Olisipo. It is a simple evolution of the same word, not a different word. It changed because Lisboa is Portuguese for Al-Usbuna. In the same logic of yours, London changed its name from Londinium to London and if conquered and settled by Portuguese people it would be called (changed to) Londres (Portuguese for London).
Are you watching from any of these capitals?
No, sorry. I just live in small town USA.
Frome Santiago of Chile xd
From Beijing! :D Which has also been called loads of names including, but not limited to: Dadu, Yanjing, and Beiping.
Yes I Live Close To Al Aasimah In Arabia
Small town in Denmark, 30-60 mins (due to traffic) from Copenhagen
Portugal's capital didn't change it's name. Al-Usbuna is just a phonetic adaptation (to Arabic) of its previous name, Olissipona, itself derived from Olissipo . And in 1147 it didn't change to Lisbon. Lisbon is the English name, in Portuguese it's Lisboa. But all those versions (as well as Lisbona, Lissabona, Lissabon) are not name changes, but adaptations to different languages (like London in French, Spanish and Portuguese is Londres).
I didn't knew about this history but, since i'm brazilian, it was obvious that Al-Usbuna and Lisboa are related. It is like he just read it on a list and decided to include without further research
TIL london isn't called london in spanish
@@liamdstuff That's what I said in my comment
i think you forgot tokyo, it was called Edo during the shogunate
Many still call it that. And he covered it previously.
Was it the capital then?
@@brokkrep Yes and not, the imperial capital was Kyoto, but the emperor didn't have much power compared to the shogun, who lived in Edo.
Instresting in my country people dont associate it with the capital but more our big cities of Sydney n Melbourne but fun fact canberra our capital was made because Sydney n Melbourne both wanted to be the capital when we became a country but they did the parent dealing with kids fighting thing none of you will be and decided on Canberra half way between the 2 lol
Indeed. A very important example.
Beijing ("Northern Capital") was once confusingly named Nanjing ("Southern Capital") as one of the capitals of Liao dynasty, and it made sense cuz it was to the south of the other capital Shangjing ("Upper Capital")
Nanjing is a different city though?
@@AvrahamYairStern The Liao dynasty did not control the Nanjing that is modern Nanjing. But Beijing was their souther capital so it got the name 南京 anyway.
@@bocbinsgames6745 ohhh
End Tokyo is called "eastern Capital". While it sounds different, because it's in a different language, it still uses the same character: 京 for Kyo / Jing
@@Frahamen its is named because Tokyo is east of Kyoto, the old capital. No connection with Chinese capitals, though same characters.
2:54 Another good reason for the name change is also the fact that King Leopold II of Belgium is viewed negatively because of his enslavement of the Congolese when it was then known as Congo Free State.
and lets not forget the genocide he had going on down there.
@@Gjoufi which didnt happened. There was only 1000 colonists in the congo free state. Do you seriously think they killed 15 africans?
@@j.m.d.a1496 LOL dude it's common knowledge. It does even have it's own wikipedia page
It's like poland name their capital as Hitlermiasto
Also probably because King Leopold personally owned The Congo
word pronunciation according to Patrick:
AsTana = 'AsanTa'
Nur-Sultan = 'Norsorton'
BishKek = 'BishBek'
And pronouncing Godthåb as Godthab
Al-Usbuna? Drop the As on each end and add a vowel shift: it's the same name. Al-Usbuna -> Lusbun -> Lisbon
This reminds me of the progression of L'viv: Lemburg to Lew Vov to L'vov (vov being equivalent to burg and Lew being the Polish equivalent of the German Lem) then to Lviv
It’s Lwow, freaking autocorrect...
@@kohwenxu no, that was my mistake. I wasn't aware of which spelling was official. I learned geography quite a long time ago
Tokyo used to be Edo.
Yep. Tokyo literally means Eastern Capital. Tokugawa decided that the Emperor can stay in Kyoto, he's going to go to his own capital.
For a guy running a channel based on explaining etymology, the amount of mispronunciation in 99% of your videos is honestly impressive
Baile Átha Cliath is the official name for Dublin in Irish. This name comes from one of the 3 original Viking settlements. One of the other settlements was called Dubh Linn which then changed into Dublin. Also, Baile Átha Cliath is pronounced Bol-ya Awe-ha Clee-ah.
I don't think the examples of Greenland and Ireland are really name changes, as *both* names are official. But they may have changed which of the two is the "most" official.
As far as I remember, Dublin was founded by Normans with this (Normannish) name, and the name Baile Atha Cliath was given to it by the Irish, but both names are official names today.
Being a linguistic channel you should really learn how to pronounce the capitals in the local language. I stopped counting but you massacred a lot of names. You kept adding letters where they weren't. For example Astana not Astanta, or Bishkek not Bishbek. Ribnica is pronounced Ribnitza not ribinica
Exactly!
It was pretty painful.
Like it's not so difficult, I understand there are very difficult and strange languages and you can't do an exhaustive linguistic research just to mention it in the video, but... In well-known languages like Spanish, French or whatever??? And even if you just pronounce everything as written in English: is really so difficult to pronounce a word without inserting imaginary letters??? It almost seems like if every name was written in ambiguous hieroglyphs he has to guess while reading... In the case of Lourenço Marques, Ç is a letter even some English words like "façade" have, what's wrong there? I really can't understand what's the problem of name explain with pronouncing names
Patrick seems to really bounce between two syllables in names by adding a vowel in between the two syllables. I wonder why that is; it seems systemic
yeah, mispronunciation is his "signature". but, we -the audience- must press on, so he at least bothers to pronounce it half-decent.
You missed out on Bolivia's capital, it has had a total of 4 names throughout its history. Originally it was known as Charcas, which later on changed to La Plata and then Chuquisaca. Nowadays it's known as Sucre, the City of Four Names.
Indonesia: Kalapa --> Jayakarta --> Batavia --> Jakarta
Honestly, this is one of the most common example :)
Yeah,i was thinking about this earlier
It's Sunda Kelapa, not Kalapa
@@RosyMiranto well maybe that's what you learned in school. but ancient/old Sundanese actually had different spellings.
@@kriegwhatever okay, but when i check Wikipedia the name is... Sunda Kalapa in Sundanese, so... Yeah. We both wrong i guess
@@RosyMiranto where is the part that I'm wrong?
As an Irishman, I can confirm that Baile Átha Cliath is just the Irish name for Dublin (I know the origin of "Dublin", but I don't want to rob you of a name to explain), it was always called Dublin (it wasn't always the capital though, and according to Corkonians like myself, it still isn't, we call Cork "the real capital")
Amazing! A commenter who knows what he's talking about! How the Hell did you get in here?
@@waynemarvin5661 I've been watching Patrick's videos for a long time, and I've alwayd been excited to find out new things about names, geography, countries/cities, etc.
Baile Átha Cliath is the name of the original Gaelic settlement, north of the river Liffey, near the Four Courts. Dublin is the name of the Norse (Viking) settlement and trading post established around 1000 BC south of the river. I’ll let Patrick work out the origin of these names, and which local geographical features they were named after (and which English city shares its name with Dublin).
@@noelleggett5368 There is also a suburb in Cork with that name (that of that English city), though we pronounce it with the stress on the last syllable (think "record" as a noun vs "record" as a verb)
@@aaronodonoghue1791 I’m very used to my friends from Cork putting their emPHAsis on a different sylLAble to me. 😃
Ah, Leopoldville, having your capital named after one of the worse mass murderer in history isn't a good idea. Anything else is preferrable.
Still a lot of people in Namibia have names of some German guy who made genocide there.
Being such a large RUclipsr, it shouldn't be too hard for you to find help from your followers when pronouncing foreign names; it is a small detail, but it would go a long way to make your channel look more professional. I can forgive more obscure non-european languages, but I would assume British people have at least a certain understanding of how French and Spanish are supposed to sound like. I don't expect you to sound native-like, but even close enough would be highly appreciated.
Like even looking a city in Wikipedia most often gives you the pronounciation, I can't get what this man is doing to pronounce everything so wrongly...
I've said it in another comment, but I'll repeat it here: we -the audience- must press on or otherwise convince him to at least bother to pronounce those names half-decent.
@@proCaylak As long as he keeps getting that sweet patreon money he won't ever improve. People should vote with their money.
@@mfaizsyahmi voting with wallet, that's definitely a valid way to convince him.
yeah, that patreon section at the beginning of his video has been getting on my nerves. just another example of relying too much on youtube as a career.
Kazakh names should be easy to pronounce, yet he butchered it all.
Oslo was “Christiania” not christiana.
Funny he dropped a vowel sound in this name and added a vowel sound in the middle of a couple of Latin names
I was just going to check. I had that impression but wasn't 100%.
Come to think of it it's just Christian with the -ia suffix.
Lisbon didn't change its name, the Arab name is just the arab iteration of Lisboa, the portuguese name.
And that's even an easy to see one, Alusbuna - Lisbon, yeah, nothing alike. The day this man has to explain a name like Seville going like Hispalis > Ishbiliya > Sevilla instead of radically changing its name to another randomly his brain will explode
I'm not Korean, but can pronounce the language rather well thanks to almost 4 years of Kpop fandom. And the "eo" in the Korean names aren't pronounced like in English, but as a single vowel that's kinda like a cross between an o and a schwa. And for that matter, "eu" is pronounced by unrounding your lips while saying "oo" (basically, it's the "ı" vowel in my native Turkish) and "ae", while having a more obvious pronounciation, is still a single vowel. Hope this helps.
A few small corrections to the part about Oslo (where I live), you missed the last "i" in "Christiania" and when you say old Oslo used to be in "a completely different location" I think most people hearing it will think it moved a significant distance (which it really didn't) - the city center was relocated after a devastating fire in 1624 but was moved little more than a kilometer and the old town was soon incorporated back into the city, today old town lies within the borough descriptively named "old Oslo" (one of Oslo's 15 boroughs) and it'll take you just north of 10 minutes to walk there from the central train station.
Btw don't get confused about the å in Godthåb. Håb and Hope is from the same word and is pronounced very similar.
I really thought the å was supposed to sound like o in "moth".
Thanks. 😂
It's unfortunate istanbul isn't the capital of turkey. Otherwise there's a nice reference we could make.
Istanbul has probably had dozens of names (Lagus, Byzantium, Constantinople, Miklagaðr, Tsargrad, Islambol etc.)
It was during the Ottoman era.
It was during the Ottoman era.
@@jaojao1768 Miklagarðr and Tsargrad was just its name in other languages though
That's nobody's business but the Turks!
5:11 Ribnica is pronounced Ribnitza, and Podgorica is Podgoritza
7:28 Laibach is just a German name for Ljubljana
You should run your city names through a text to speech application (like the Google translate audio button) to see the correct pronunciations so you won't mispronounce all the time.
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
I'm not Danish, but I think "Got-Hope" is a good enough english approximation of "Godthåb". "God-thab" might be a stretch...
Brasil's capital, Brasília did not change names... the City has about 70 years 😂
*60
The name Otto was not given to the city of Ottawa, it was renamed after the Ottawa river that itself got its name from the algonquin word "Odawa", to trade. -wikipedia
Locals today still pronounce it as odawa as we rarely enunciate the double 't'
Anyone else see the title and start singing "Istanbul was Constantinople"?
The current capital of Turkey is Ankara.
@@Claro1993 understood, but They Might Be Giants never wrote a song about Ankara.
@@spddiesel they didn't write one about istanbul either, they covered it.
@@sogghartha I bet you two are great at parties...
Missed the capital of Estonia, Tallinn. It used to be called Reval (plus a few other names throughout history that were less official).
In Romanised Lao TH is an aspirated T and PH is an aspirated P, as commonly used in English. Lao has a non-aspirated T and P sound which is not present in English and is Romanised without the H. You did a better job pronouncing Vientiane than a lot of foreigners do, so well done there. The only thing I'd mention is that the V sounds like a W. These same spellings are used for Romanised Thai as well. As a side note, and for future reference, Romanised Burmese uses HT for an aspirated T and TH for the same TH sound we use in the word "thanks" in English.
I'm no native English speaker so I never aspirate any letter except when reading ancient Greek who has both kind of sounds, whoever although it doesn't make any difference in English they actually use both aspirated and unaspirated consonants, it just depends where they are located in the word
@@asherl5902 Regardless, he pronounced the PH and TH sounds in those names incorrectly, they ought to sound like a regular P and T in English.
Iirc, Neacșu's letter, the oldest document in Romanian, refers to Istanbul as Țarigrad (Istanbul itself had also been called Constantinople and Byzantium previously)
Heijo is the name for Pyongyang when it was under Japanese occupation. Japanese does not have a romanisation based on Spanish sounds, rather English, Heijo is pronounced like saying hey joe! rather than heyho
Missed out India .... Delhi has had many names
The name "Indraprastha" is believed to be a 5000 year old name of the city and from that it has changed many times as well !
anyways ... Great video!! :)
The capital of India is NEW Delhi, not Delhi
Beijing actually has a lot of old names, for a lot of old cities that were at/near the modern site.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Beijing
Yeah for Dublin it is the case that the city adopted that new Irish name as the name Dublin comes from Dubh Linn which means black pool.
Also that pronunciation of Baile Átha Cliath was *horrendous*
@@cf_spacetime I could let that slide since he's not Irish or living in Ireland but yeah, foreign words aren't his forte
@@Gallalad1 *forté
Kidding, I know forte is the more accepted English spelling in spite of the continuing pronunciation
Budapest of Hungary used to be 2 cities, Buda and Pest on opposite sides of the Danube river (Buda being the capital with the castle, but Pest having the bigger population due to its flat terrority). In 1873 after multiple bridges had conntected the cities for a while, it made sense to unite them into... Pest-Buda which stayed for like one year before they realized it's way too annoying to pronounce so they swapped it to Budapest.
I think this video might be making a mistake. Should a city that changed country count as changing name when they are conquered/ceded? It seems strange...
Neither do cities which were rebuilt over or next to ancient settlements, nor that just stop using the colonial name to use the native name in their local language
The C in Podgorica is pronounced like the zz in pizza. Same for the former names.
Da, tu stranci koji nisu iz slavenskog govornog područja često griše.
Regarding Beijing, it actually did change its name from Beiping, and several others. There's literally a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to the names of Beijing. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Beijing
I the province of Ontario, where Ottawa is, up until 1916 we actually had *three* European capitals in the south-west part of the province, all along or at least near the Thames River. London and Paris are still there, but during WW I the citizens of Berlin decided to change the name to Kitchener, after Lord Kitchener.
Indonesian capital, Jakarta, also got some changes troughout its history. Oldest recorded name (at least from what I know) for the city was Sunda Kelapa, which was given by the ruler at the time, the Sunda Kingdom. Then it was conquered by Mataram Sultanate, it changed to Jayakarta (Victorious City). Then it was once again conquered by Dutch East Indies Company, burn to the ground, and on its ruins a new city was built and named Batavia. Then finally, in the end of 1940s, it was renamed Jakarta, which I suppose is a shorten version of Jayakarta.
In the Philippines, the Capital City of Manila are didn’t changed the name since the foundation in 1571 so mostly of the renaming places are Provincial Capital and Non-capital cities and municipalities
A similar topic for a video (though not exactly on-brand for Name Explain) would be nations that moved their capitals to a different city entirely, such as the U.S. changing its capital from Philadelphia to Washington.
Washington
Same
Hello from Montgomery County
Whilst Peking to Beijing is not a name change, Beijing has gone through many names
蓟 / Ji (ancient), 燕京 / Yanjing (An Lushan Yan, Liao, Jin), 广阳 / Guangyang (Qin), 幽州 / Youzhou (Tang), 南京 / Nanjing (seriously), 中都 / Zhongdu (Later Jin), Khanbaliq (Yuan), 北平 / Beiping (Ming, ROC), amongst others
Lucky Canada changed its name from Bytown. In Norse by (found in Somersby, Rugby, Derby etc.) means town. Let's pop over to towntown fellas.
Bratislava is the Slovakian name, Pozsony the Hungarian name, and Pressburg the German one, reflecting Bratislava's history as Slovakian town in the Kingdom of Hungary, which in turn was ruled by the German speaking Hapsburg dynasty. So it was not a renaming, there are three simultaneously used names for the same town. Hungarians still call the town Poszony, and in German maps, you find the name Pressburg.
1:31 Beijing did actually change its name when the Nationalist KMT government moved the capital to Nanjing; Beijing was called Peiping (Beiping depending on your transliteration) from 1928 to 1949. It was renamed Beijing after the Communists took over.
While the Greeks referred to it as “Oea,” the original name of Tripoli was Oyat.
Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, has changed its name a lot in the past:
- Tugu: the original settlement in what is now Tanjung Priok on 5th century, north of the city
- Sunda Kelapa: the name of settlement a bit west of Tugu on 7-15th century, both now part of modern Jakarta
- Jayakarta: when Sunda Kelapa fell to Fatahillah, he changed its name to Jayakarta, mean "victorious city"
- Batavia: the Dutch razed Jayakarta to the ground and build the whole new settlement, named after Germanic tribe Batavi. The indigenous ethnic group Betawi is named after it.
- Jakarta (Djakarta before 1972): phonetical adaptation of Jakarta, used again when Japanese colonized Indonesia. The name stays after independence.
Bogota, the capital of Colombia, was founded by the spanish as Santa Fe in 1539, then, the name was changed to Bogota in 1819, upon independence, and it was changed again in 1991 to Santa Fe de Bogota, but people didn't like it, so it was changed again in 2000 to the current official name, just Bogota.
U forgot to mention Batavia changed to Jakarta after Indonesia became independent in 1945. Batavia still retains its name in New York state in the US.
Bratislava wasn't previously known as Pozsony, that's just the Hungarian name for it.
It used to be called Presporok, that is the actual name change:
Presporok(Hungarian: Pozsony, German: Pressburg) -> Bratislava
And since it's Pozsony in Hungarian, the pronunciation would be Hungarian. His pronunciation spelled in Hungarian would be Poszoní, which isn't correct.
Oslo was Christiania NOT "Christiana" (never heard that name). And you mispronounced the name Godthåb in Greenland.
What a blunder. Sorry, but this video is a total mess!
He is (in)famous for his atrocious pronunciation, don't worry :)
And the Slovakian city that was known as Pozsony was from the Hungarian name as far as I can tell. That pronunciation is therefore /poʒoɲ/, but he goes with /posoniː/, which isn't close. This pronunciation was very easy to find on Wiktionary. Being a channel about names, and not being able to pronounce them correctly despite there being easy to find sources, is just silly and lazy.
Dublin never stopped being called Baile Atha Cliath. If I was to speak to you in Irish that is how I would refer to my native city, as a side note it translates as 'City of the hurdles.'
St Petersburg - Petrograd
Leningrad
Not the capitol city.
It was the capital during the Tsardom of Russia and the Russian Empire but it’s not the capital anymore.
Very interesting video, as always. A suggestion regarding pronunciation of South Slavic names: The letter ''c'' is pronounced as ''ts'', not as ''k'' or ''s''. So, it would be ''Podgoritsa'' in pronunciation. Other letter pronunciations include ''č'' and ''ć'' both being pronounced as ''ch'', ''š'' as ''sh'', ''ž'' as ''zh'', and both ''dž'' and ''đ'' as ''j'' in ''jar'', ''jazz'', or ''John''. Still, kudos for effort (as you deal with hundreds of languages).
And the Slovakian name which was in Hungarian, the "zs" is J like you gave examples of, and "ny" is the Spanish Ñ
While working with a lot of languages is a reason why you won't always get the right pronunciation, the pronunciations for Pozsony and Godthåb (which he also mispronounced) are easily available on Wiktionary.
If the names aren't on Wiktionary, or Wikipedia, I can excuse not pronouncing it correctly.
Paris used to be called Lutetia during Roman times.
Tokyo was called Edo during the Edo period. (great naming there.)
Dublin hasn't had a name change, Dublin is it's name in English.
The 'modern' city of Dublin was established by Viking invaders.
There's also Saigon or officially known as Ho Chi Minh city
It's not a capital anymore
@@risannd oh ty for correcting me
@@inceldestroyer1069 basically once the North Vietnamese captured the South and won the Vietnam War, the capital city title of the united country shifted to the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi.
Sunda Kelapa > Jayakarta > Batavia > Jakarta
A fello indonesian
Bratislava is still called Pozsony today by Hungarian speakers. I assume the preceding names of Pressburg and Pozsony were universal + official because of Austro-Hungary. But the latter still remains alive today.
How does the old Korean name for Pyongyong have a Q when there is no letter Q in Korean (if you want the "qu" sound, you use "kw")
Anciently Korean was written with Chinese characters, although they didn't had the sound transliterated as "q" in chinese (I think is something like our "ch") they probably use a character which used it originally in chinese, like maybe meaning more a concept than a sound or whatever, not sure of how it worked anyway. Their script after created also had many letters just to write chinese sounds but they are no longer used. I've seen that people today in Korea may go like "what does your name mean?" And the other person writes his name in chinese characters and the other like "aaah, so Jokang means 'happiness', it's pretty"...
In Serbocroatian (for the Montenegrin names & if you do names from Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, & Montenegro in the future) the C is pronounced like a ts is in English like in tsar or bats
As montenegro has very similar language:
Ribnica means probably just Fishtown. Podgorica means The town under the mountain. I notice, that even in Czech and other slavic languages we tend to like those a little bit dumb, self evident names. I am no exception, I like them too. :-D
Another toppic for video maybe? :-)
My name was once Jef...........
Have you made a video about all the places named Victoria in the world? I bet it would surprise many people
It's amazing how you missed Jakarta....
Beijing(北京) was once named Beiping(北平)
Podgoritsa is how you say it
belgrade also used to be called nándorfehérvár
You forgot Buenos Aires. It was officially called Ciudad de la Trinidad until 1994, although nobody called it that.
Bytown was a very small town it eventually just started growing and growing and growning
I guess that the change from Rangoon to Yangon is considered a minor change. In fact, it might be a non-change like from Peking to Beijing.
What about Hamedan? It was called Ekbatan before that Hekmatane.
And Hamedan was a capital of Iran.
Indonesia : Jayakarta - Batavia ( Under NL) - Jakarta
Freetown, Sierra Leone was built upon an old portuguese settlement
Batavia
For one day, the capitol of Kansas changed its name to Google
For another day, the capital of Kansas changed its name to ToPikachu
You have a very specific pattern of mispronouncing names: you flip the syllables around.
You read Kinshasa as Kinsasha
and Trujilo as Trulijo (and then used an Eastern European pronunciation for the j, instead of Spanish)
also you read Jahangir as Jaganhir
Bishkek as Bishbek
among other examples
Hope that helps!
There's so many mispronunciations; one would think a channel called Name Explain would take extra care into making sure the names are correctly pronounced.
Paris used to be called Lutécium during Roman times.
It's Ashgabat not Ashgrabat
I guess Benin didn't change the name of their capital, but changed the city named as the capital.
Chach,Shash,Shashkent,Chachkent>Binkath>Tashkent
0:22 what's your favourate country?
"PaRiS"
Kyrgyzstan capital was named Frunze after a soviet leader of Romanian descent. Frunze are leafs in Romanian.
Puerto Rico was the name of the capital city of the island of San Juan Bautista.... It was later changed and now the island is named Puerto Rico, and the capital San Juan.
All for the better that Leopoldville had its name changed. Still burned in my memory after all these years was a picture in Life or Saturday Evening Post of the body of a white boy laying in the street of Leopoldville after a rebel attack The dead boy appeared to be about the same age as I was at the time--about 10.
the amount of mispronunciation this video have is cosmical
Washing DC used to be called Columbia (from the C in DC)
That’s actually why Washington state was named Washington and not Columbia the other suggested name. As it would’ve been confused with the capital which was called Columbia at the time. There was no official name change people just switched to Washington instead overtime
As far as I know, the city is called "Washington, D.C." like meaning the Washington city which is in the District of Columbia, while the district as distinct entity of the US is called just Columbia, not Washington, which is just a city inside it and it's capital. However, all the few other inhabited placed there ended merging with the city of Washington, which at the end came to occupy all the district territory and thus the name of the city now is used for the Columbia although legally and properly speaking aren't the same district since there is no longer difference.
In Mexico is similar for example, Mexico City now is what in the formely called Federal District (was the same) were different cities, one of them being the original Mexico City, but then they all merged and became indistinguishable, now are each one like neighborhoods in the same city.
As a channel based on names, I did not hear you say a single one of these names right
Brussel used to be Broekzele which used to be Bruocsella
Yes but that happened as a gradual shift than a deliberate change. So did Lisbon btw.
If your job is explaining names, you should try to at least say them right, like use a text to speech or something.
Bratislava has been called Pozsony (you butchered it, thank you very much) since 950 A.D, until 1920 when it was taken from Hungary by the treaty of Trianon. Pressburg is just the German name for it by the Austrians. If you want a former slavic name for it, it was called Prešporok until 1919. Come on man, that's just lazy research. (this took me 25 seconds to look up)
You forgot to mention Mexico City which used to be called Tenochtitlán
Watching in Bytowne
Lisbon didn't change its name. Al-Usbuna is the Arabic archaic form of the name Lisboa, both evolved from the greek-latin name Olisipo. It is a simple evolution of the same word, not a different word. It changed because Lisboa is Portuguese for Al-Usbuna. In the same logic of yours, London changed its name from Londinium to London and if conquered and settled by Portuguese people it would be called (changed to) Londres (Portuguese for London).
Jakarta used to be Sunda Kelapa then Jayakarta then Jakarta