Posted by Adam Quinan on June 26, 2006 at 08:28:22 from 72.136.51.111 user Adam.
In Reply to: Re: Kanchenjunga or Kangchenjunga posted by John on June 24, 2006 at 20:35:25:
So John what do you call the capital of Portugal? Lisbon or Lisboa? How about Florence or Firenze? Is it Mumbai or Bombay? Peking or Beijing? Udaipur or Oodeypore (an earlier accepted spelling)
Place name spelling by non-locals of a local pronunciations is always tricky. Eventually after a period an accepted spelling is adopted which may or may not reflect accurately the local name. There is a village in Somerset which is now known as Stogursey. Etymologically it comes from the historically more correct Stoke Courcy and is recorded as that in early documents. The local pronunciation was written down by someone and the "wrong" name became attached to the village. The task is made more difficult when we are dealing with a non-English name and people are trying to fit non-English sounds to English spelling.
Over the years evidence shows that spellings of Kangchenjunga have varied and I suspect the Wikipedia folk are trying to claim that Kangchenjunga is the one and only spelling when even the King of Sikkim says it should be something else but he will put up with the Westerners spelling it wrong.
The article lists about five different spellings and on Google (for what that is worth) Kanchenjunga is by far and away the most common. If Ransome invented that spelling, then his influence on a certain sub-part of the English language has been profound. An assertion that while I wish it could be true I feel is unsupported by any real evidence.
So my assertion is that Ransome used the commonly accepted spelling for the time he was writing regardless of what the Wikipedia folk claim should be used today. If he used a common and widespread spelling, then he should not be accused of making a mistake as John and Wikipedia have done. Evidence has been presented that Kanchenjunga was in use in at least the American press (Time magazine).
I don't think John has offered any documentary evidence that "Kangchenjunga" was the only accepted and widely used spelling in 1930 and his statement that AR was wrong to use "Kanchenjunga" is unsupported by any evidence apart from the Wikipedia claims which I am disputing. I am searching for real and independent evidence that Ransome used a spelling that was incorrect (in the sense that he basically invented a wrong way of spelling the name). His refusal to "cut AR any slack" because "he got it wrong" is rather dissmissive of a writer who in so many ways tried painstakingly to "get things right".