Why did they used to write "Beijing" as "Peking" even though the pronunciation never changed? And why are there so many different ways to spell the Arabic name "Muhammed"?

UNFORTUNATELY, this new series hasn't taken off as I had hoped, so this will actually be the last video in this series, at least for a while. On the other hand, there will be more "A Look At Languages" videos coming. I'll have a short update about the channel next week. Thanks as always for watching!

ADDITIONS/CORRECTIONS:
Strictly speaking, the "ZH" in Pinyin is a retroflex version of "Z" (pronounced like "dz") and not "J", but for the purpose of this brief guide, I figured it better to stick to what it sounds like to most English speakers, which is a retroflex "J"

The Chinese name for Coca Cola is Ke Kou Ke Le, and the characters used for it literally mean "Can" (as in "is able to") "Mouth" "Can" "Joy"
The meaning of the first two characters in the Chinese name for Houston mean "rest" and a Classical Chinese word for "this"
The meaning of the first two characters in the Chinese name for Cape Town mean "open" and "common"

Photos in this video include the works of:
Rafik Wahba
Magda Ehlers
Vmenkov
Sams321
Pixabay
Leah Kelley
@felipepelaquim
1983 (steal my _ _ art)
Rodolfo Cuadros
Adam Stefanca
ThePowerCouple
Julia Volk
Shearer
Tom S
Dinesh kag
Nick Bondarev
Photoholgic
Yang Yang
Li Yang
Zhangzhugang
Nick Kwan
David Castor
Adam Jones
Atul Vinayak
Andrea Piacquadio
Uwe Dedering
Tom Winckels
Joshua Fernandez
Arron Choi
Marcin Nowak
Jason Villanueva
Zoë Reeve
Zhang Kaiyv