The history of, and explanations for, the varieties of names for Beijing ('northern capital') is so complex and detailed that it gets its own wikipedia page:
To the Burmese, the word "Myanmar" represents the oppressive and insane dictator who overthrew a democratic society to institute a communism that nobody wanted, keeping Burma in the dark ages for decades. One of the dictatorial general's feats as he rose to power was quashing civil unrest and rival communist movements among the minority tribes of Burma, and "Myanmar" is the name of the majority ethnicity. You can understand that people remain a little sore about the name change.
"Burma" is an English corruption of the Yangonese word for "Myanmar", but to the Burmese democratic movement--and the many minority tribes--the word represents an ethnicity-neutral name for the entire country.
Might be interesting to graph all these next to editor or leadership changes, as well as style guide revisions. Or actually, current events, now that I look at some of the years where it's been sharpest.
It's "programme" in British-English for everything except "computer program" (in my experience). Probably because most programmer-culture is centred in North America.
I imagine that it's simply some NYT writer(s) using the British-English spelling, rather than a wider cultural trend, unless somebody is aware of any other examples?
"The international name Constantinople also remained in use until the Turkish Postal Service Law of March 28, 1930, according to which all foreign countries were asked to solely use the name Istanbul also in their languages and their postal service networks."
Compare that to Myanmar / Burma, who also ask people to use the Myanmar form. Since it's not a democratic government there is some resistance to the new name.
The first of these is still spelled æsthetic in some places. The general convention in US spelling of replacing æ and œ with e seems more jarring to me than other differences in orthography between US and commonwealth English
I can't run the nytlabs thing because a) windows phone, and b) when I try to enter æ I get another character... (potentially see (a))
It's typically spelled aesthetic in American English nowadays (without the ligature). In that one the NYT was a hold-out in the other direction: esthetic never overtook aesthetic in general American usage, though for a period in the 20th century it looked like it might (encyclopedia did definitively displace encyclopaedia). It looks like the NYT wholesale made the ae->e switch around 1920, and then in the case of aesthetic finally realized it wasn't going to happen, and reverted to common usage in 2000.
I have no idea how general this is, but in my experience the split appears to be on philosophy (aesthetics) vs beauty salon (esthetician) lines. I've seen the ae spelling used for the latter but not the e spelling for the former.
I love this stuff. One thing I miss about no longer working at Microsoft is the site license for OED
These words aren't German borrowings, so that isn't related at all. The ae in this class of words is from Latin æ (ultimately from Greek αι). The ae->e shift was an attempt at spelling simplification, to remove some vestigial Latinisms, but only partially succeeded.
True, although I believe than in itself is only a slightly older (circa 1900) spelling reform. In older German books, you see Aesthetik/aesthetische/etc. instead. Lots of borrowing and adaptation...
What this shows is the old NY Times house style oddity where they described CDs as "compact disks" rather than using the trademark Compact Disc. (Pre-1980, it is not clear to me.)
True. The NYT editorial standards have always been downright bullheaded, even with trademarks ("I.B.M.") where they have no authority to contradict anyone else's usage.
The Google Books dataset suggests the crossover point was around 1905 in AmE, but not until the late 1970s in BrE (modulo the usual caveats about how their data isn't necessarily a representative sample):
"Muslim" replaced "moslem" in about 1988: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=moslem.muslim [Apparently for good reason: http://hnn.us/article/524 ]
"Peking" was replaced by "Peiping" in 1930, but it was back to "Peking" in 1962, and then finally changed to "Beijing" in 1985: http://chronicle.nytlabs.com/?keyword=peking.beijing.peiping