Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

achow

'Bangalore' vs 'Bengaluru' by people of Karnataka - the state of which Bangalore is capital of.

Bangalore: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=IN-KA&q=bangalo...

Bengaluru: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=IN-KA&q=bengalu...

View on HN

please look at it for "all time" (that google has data for)

Bangalore: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=IN-KA&...

Bengaluru: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=IN-KA&...

This is a post-colonial battle still being fought, and India's wish to shed its colonial shackles deserves to be respected.

My one year Google Trend time range was deliberate. When both 'Bangalore' and 'Bengaluru' is equally familiar with public AND 'Bengaluru' is being pushed by govt institutions, we need to see which name is still in trend with locals. 'Bangalore' name should have been at zero if all the locals were using the new name.

If the time range is increased to the time when Bengaluru was not yet a familiar term then it is quite obvious that this new name would trend upwards to the current time.

I know it was deliberate, and deliberately hiding the story.

Certainly several locals will prefer the name they grew up with. Some find it rolls off the tongue better when speaking English, or just because they used Bangalore for many years already. No such change will ever have 100% coverage in such a short time, yet I think it's worth consciously respecting. Locals will use both interchangeably because it's often used informally, but I think for anything official, it's important to use the correct and official name, which is Bengaluru. Such as here, this is not an informal post by YC but an official announcement.

You have to put both terms in together to be able to compare them in the same scale:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=IN-KA&...

> This is a post-colonial battle still being fought, and India's wish to shed its colonial shackles deserves to be respected.

Calling it a 'battle' that is being fought and 'shackles' being shed and all is a bit bombastic. And kindly do not purport to speak for all Indians.

What's next? Are you going to fight the battle to call Patna Pataliputra? Rajasthan Rajputana? How far back in history do the really real names lie?

> and India's wish to shed its colonial shackles deserves to be respected.

They city can become respected by having a reputation of being topmost liveable city in the world, that is far more respectable instead playing silly games like changing names which waste taxpayer money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com