The reports of the tragic events in Bombay tell me that the city is now known as Mumbai. This was news to me. Things change, but I'd just gotten used to the change from Peking to Beijing.

There surely have been other changes in major geographical names or their transliterations. Such as? Richard, as travel agent, will surely be a font of information here.

Mumbai's name changed in 1995. (It was already the Marathi name of the city.) Chennai, too: Madras.

There have been many such, especially in countries that were once colonies. Zimbabwe, capital Harare, was once Rhodesia, capital Salisbury.

I do not know of any consolidated travel reference source that lists all the changes; I suppose it doesn't really matter too much after a year or two.

However, this is obviously important in the postage stamp collecting world and one article about these sorts of changes can be found here http://www.linns.com/howto/refresher/country_20050328/refreshercourse.asp

Time magazine still refers to the city as Bombay, which was quite confusing. I'm not sure if it is an editorial decision or something else.

I've also noticed a trend in British news media, at least, to refer to towns and cities abroad by their local name, rather than that often used by the British.

For years, for example, we called the French port Marseilles, but the French seemed to think it was called Marseille. Similarly, we always called Lyon Lyons. Now we generally use their version. Anyone would think we didn't know better than Johnny Foreigner!

Which way do you think it should be? Should we anglicize place names or attempt to use their own accents and language? This happened during the last olympics, too - some confusion about what the cities should be called. Which way do you all think is best?