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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Bombay, Ceylon, Siam, Persia

You're actually mixing up a lot of different things. Bombay was never renamed - it's transliteration into Latin characters was changed to better reflect it's pronunciation in Indian English. It's always been मुंबई in Marathi and Hindi. (They mostly share an alphabet.)

Florence is simply the original Latin name of a Roman city, and Firenze is what the name of the city drifted to as the local language evolved from Latin to Italian.

Persia was an actual name change; basically the Parsis were (and still are) the dominant ethnic group of the larger region that is now Iran but were originally from a smaller area called Pars. They formed an empire and conquered other ethnic groups/regions (Kurdistan, Balochistan) that - to this day - wish to escape Persian rule (or at least some do). The name change to Iran was meant to be more inclusive. Also, both the official Wikipedia page and most quora questions very carefully forget to mention that shortly after the Shah's 1935 declaration that Persia is "Land of the Aryans", Hitler declared them to be "pure Aryan" in 1936 and forged a close alliance with them.

(Amusing observation: every Persian female I've met in the US purports to be ultra woke socialist leftist, but will revert back to a sneering 1488-style biodeterminist at the idea of Kurdish or Baloch self-determination.)

Siam was also a real renaming - from the Kingdom of Siam to Thailand, the latter of which has the double meaning "Land of the Free" (never colonized) and "Land of the Tai [ethnic group]".

Also, both the official Wikipedia page and most quora questions very carefully forget to mention that shortly after the Shah's 1935 declaration that Persia is "Land of the Aryans", Hitler declared them to be "pure Aryan" in 1936 and forged a close alliance with them.

It was more than that if I recall correctly - the idea for the name change was originally a suggestion by the Nazi ambassador to Persia.