Context: The Greeks used to say 'εἰς τὴν πόλιν' (eis tin polin), which the Turks said as Is-tan-bul. The phrase meaning 'to the city'
Why did Constantinople get the works,
That's nobody's business but the... Greeks?
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
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Thanks, now I've got that song stuck in my head again.
The Residents?
Had to look it up and I can't even say the music video for that song is even in the top 10 weirdest music videos I've seen from them. The song, though, not for me in the slightest.
Means, "is the city", yeah? Like, the Greeks just referred to it as The City?
Pretty unrelated, but I always wondered if the -pur ending for Indian cities was a cognate of -polis.
It actually is, the -pur ending comes from Sanskrit पुर् (púr) which is related to greek πόλις (polis)
Ok. Thanks for confirming that, and answering my second unasked question. I'd wondered if it was a legacy of Alexander's conquests, but doubted because I didn't think he made it as far as Bengal, though I wondered if it was a Greek linguistic relic that got naturalised into Hindi/Bengali. It's Sanskrit; makes more sense.
they honestly had a missed opportunity to loosely translate the bulgarian name tbh Tsaringrad -> Padişahşehir or Hünkârşehir (Sultran’s City)