Tangent: any Greek scholars out there? There are countless ancient and modern cities that have the suffix “polis,” Greek for “city.” Persepolis, Heliopolis, Neapolis , Indianapolis, Minneapolis, etc, etc. Yet in English we us “ople ” for Constantinople. Anyone know why?
Constantinople (”City of Constantine”) is named after Constantine the Great, the Roman emperor who legalized Christianity and reunified the empire.
He dedicated the city—previously Byzantium—as his new, explicitly Christian capital on May 11, 330 AD, designed to serve as a “New Rome” in the East.
Kōnstantinoúpolis (Κωνσταντινούπολη) is a standard compound of his name (Kōnstantínos) and the suffix for city (pólis), meaning “City of Constantine.”
In Old French the Greek suffix -polis dropped the “-is” and softened the “p” into a “ph” or “v” sound, eventually collapsing into -ople. Kōnstantinoúpolis became Constantinople in French.
English borrowed the word completely intact from the French spelling and pronunciation
You see the same fir Adrianople.
The American cities are modern
So it’s basically English is a b@$tardized tongue that is a union of Gallo Norman French on an Anglo Saxon Germanic base.
Never ever trust the English pronunciation to have a deep relation to how a word was pronounced in its original language