I can’t say that I care for the outbreak of ‘Mumbai’ that has been pouring from the telly since those terrible bombs in Bombay. Why should we suddenly call it Mumbai any more than we should now call Burma Myanmar? Twenty years ago there was a passing vogue for calling Cambodia Kampuchea.
The dictionary that I referred to said that Mumbai should be pronounced ‘Moom-buy’, and that is usually what folk say. The funny thing is when broadcasters want to be more ethnic than the Indians and say ‘Poon-jab’, when every Punjabi pronounces the first vowel as in punch (or a little more towards the vowel ‘a’, but in the same phonemic slot). Indeed the words are famously related, the Punjab being the land of the five rivers and punch apparently having five ingredients. I couldn’t name the rivers or the ingredients.
The language of the Punjab (or Punjab if you want to make it sound more modern by dropping the article, as with Lebanon or Sudan) is a cousin of English and any other Indo-European tongue.
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