Note: for any future commotion, this was supposed to be purely educational. Okay the question should be why do countries have to do this and why is it so hard not to? Wouldn’t it make sense to add this to the list of things the youth can learn at an early age?
Why can’t they just allow kids in schools to learn the true names of things no matter how hard they may be to pronounce? I understand the difficulty but computers and the Internet exist so we can translate and better implement this. Like some words in English where we have no single word translation like ‘Dejavu’ (pardon non autocorrect), I understand. But places were changed to make it easier to produce in a native tongue. I am sure it is not only America, or English, but wouldn’t we be better off respecting the culture and not changing the name, like we changed our map to the correct pronunciation of Turkey (Türkiye). So why don’t we change everything back to how the countries’ place names are pronounced by their citizens out of respect? We can learn how to pronounce things better. Would it make things harder or would it allow us to grow? I am genuinely curious.
Note: I understand some people won’t be able to pronounce them but why did they decide it would be better for a country/language than to just try to pronounce them correctly.
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The French word for apple is pomme.
The German word for apple is Apfel.The French word for Germany is Allemagne.
The German word for Germany is Deutschland.Asking why all languages don’t call Germany “Deutschland” is the same as asking why all languages don’t call apples “Apfel”.
Even within the same language, pronunciation changes by regional accent. Which region has the correct accent and which regions are kids taught to pronounce things incorrectly? Languages also change over time. The grammatical rules of English now aren’t the same as they were 100 years ago. Is English more correct now or less correct?
Language is more like music than it is math.
But I wouldn’t call someone named Frieda as Catherine. The disconnect for me comes when involving proper nouns. I understand on a historical level roughly how these came to be, but common decency tells me that I should call a proper noun by its proper name, but that isnt really true.
But you would call Alexander or Alexandra “Sasha” or even “Shura” in some Slavic languages. And you call Robert “Bob” in the US.
On the same topic, are “Alexander”, “Aleksandr” and “Oleksandr” the same name or not? What about “John” and “Ivan”?
I work with French people who call me Jos instead of Joe. My girlfriend calls me 周 (Zhou) when we text each other. I’m fine with all of them as they all map to the same conceptual name.
My name isn’t how it’s spelled, it’s the concept of “Joe”. As long as they are calling me the thing that maps to that name, I’m happy. Their brain has its own mapping between language and concepts which is distinct from mine.
That is actually kinda neat and fun :)
There are a few more names for Germany, usually chosen for the German tribe closest to the neighbouring country.
Alemannen, Germanen, Deutsche (Tiutsch in old German, which became Tyskland) and so on.
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Okay the question should be why do countries have to do this and why is it so hard not to?
Sometimes languages have sounds that are hard to pronounce in other languages.
Also sometimes we came up with a name for a place based on imperfect information and the name caught on and stuck before we learned there was a better name we could be using.
How else would they do it? Check with other countries before evolving a word?
Ukraine had a “Kyiv not Kiev” campaign, which is more or less a request to do exactly what the post is asking about, call a place by how it sounds in its native language. But I am fairly certain it is still Kiev, Kiyev, and a variation of that in many other places, and the country is still called Ukraine in English, and not Ukraïna.
No, I meant with what word the country wants to be referred as. Then, use those words as in Türkiye in America. Of course it was out of respect and agreement but it is a fantastic idea and it is just about the names. And countries might be left not changed because they don’t care or it is too hard to pronounce. But there could be a teaching of pronunciation rather than spelling.
See, that’s the thing, most countries don’t care. If they did, they’d request the international community refer to them as something else. But they don’t, so they don’t. This is a non-issue.
As a 华裔-American, I agree, we should just use all the true names of places.
I mean, what kind of a name is “China”?
Its 中国, officially 中华人民共和国.
So… lets use the real names, shall we?
This is what class would sound like:
"Alright kids, it’s time to learn about countries. As you know, Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó¹ is one of the largest guó jiā² in the world…
Xiāng Gǎng³ is a tè bié xíng zhèng qū⁴ that has de jure autonomy. Just like guǎng zhōu⁵, and the rest of guǎng dōng shěng⁶, people generally speak guǎng dōng huà⁷ (aka: yuè yǔ⁸), as a fāng yán⁹…"
You get the idea. (The “I agree” part at the beginning is sarcastic)
I bet like 90% of the Western world has trouble even hearing the words with the tones. Tonal languages is very difficult to learn, I only know how to speak a bit because I was born into it, even I have trouble with words, since I grew up in the US, I haven’t spoken Mandarin in over a decade, and only still use the basics words of Cantonese at home (since political conversations is just a one-sided conversation, with parents spewing propaganda, not even worth talking about).
If I hear people attemping to use the native (non-Anglicanized) pronounciation and absolutely butcher it, I’m gonna feel so much 尴尬/cringe. (Sorry, I just feel like people are mocking me when they try to say 你好 (Hello) since the Tones feel so “off”)
Edit:
Translations in case you were confused:
- ¹ People’s Republic of China
- ² Country
- ³ Hong Kong
- ⁴ Special Administrative Region
- ⁵ Guang Zhou (City)
- ⁶ Guang Dong Province
- ⁷ “Guang Dong” Language (commonly known as “Cantonese”)
- ⁸ “Yue” Language (another name for "Cantonese)
- ⁹ Dialect (technically, Cantonese is a Language, but they didn’t have a flag and an army… so… 🤷♂️)
I think in this case, it’s the proper nouns that should be used. If we learned it as Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghèguò (or at least whichever part of that translates to “China”), it wouldn’t be too bad. There’s not much point in also using the Cantonese versions of “country”, “language”, etc., since most languages have their own analogue for these concepts
Zhōngguò is sufficient
But that feels like saying “America”
Feels un-serious and insincere for a history / social studies class.
And technically, there is still another state with the similar name (Republic of China/中华民国), so you need the full name to clarify.
I think this exists in most languages?
Germany is Deutschland is Alemania is Allemagne is Germania
This thread is full of people who think English is the only language in the world. Its not, every language calls places with their own fashion, often different from how they are called natively. Its just how stuff works when in a country people simply don’t speak the “other” language and don’t share the same sounds either.
Calling the places with their original spelling will only create confusion because in that language, that place has a different name.
Its called translations and its how languages work, get over it.
Endonym vs exonym is a universal truth of contact between speakers of different languages. It is in no way unique to English.
Glad you mentioned endonym/exonym are you be any chance a linguist or do you study/have you studied linguistics?
Localized names are ok, why do you need to pronounce something “correct” way if your language for example doesn’t have needed sounds or they are extremely hard to pronounce, are you going to learn how to pronounce south african clicks to pronounce some city the correct way?
Its also very America centric of OP, ironically. People in other places might also adjust our names and words.
I know, I think I forgot to mention I understand that other countries do this, sorry for specifying America as I cannot speak for other countries as I am not from them nor have I been to them. This was about cultural awareness, and the fact that by learning difficult things at a younger age, ‘USA’ would be better. They are already teaching things younger and younger as we advance as a society, why not add this? I hear young kids learning more and more difficult things. But making it easier or harder is less the question, but rather advancing and making people smarter and more cultured.
I get. Still language is about being pragmatic. Adjusting pronunciations or making new words is just a means to an end: being understood.
I would love to learn that. Even as a kid I probably would have loved it. However I understand the difficulty.
Do you think that schools should spend weeks to months of time to train pronounciation of places in hundred different languages? How would you even decide which way is the correct pronounciation, if languages evolve and might sound different even in the span of a century, not even counting places where multiple ethnic groups live and have different languages and different names for places?
First, it would be a start, and second: it could be generalized to certain countries until a consensus was made. DOE/government or what is left of it could petition each country to decide this out of respect and cultural awareness. I dare not add any pathos to this argument. The more open-minded people there are the more it helps.
That’s called exonyms, and in part are a natural consequence of some language speakers not being able to reproduce some sounds of other languages.
You could call Georgia Sakartvelo, or Morocco Almaghrib, for example, but many would struggle with the tv or the gh. Or the s in Mesr for Egypt, which isn’t actually an s like the English speakers know it.
And what would you call Switzerland? There are three official languages.
Either
First of all, all languages do this to an extent. Singling out America or English seems pointless to me.
Geographical names are a nonsensical construct of traditions, conventions, and misunderstandings. Why shouldn’t a language come up with names that suit their tongue? Why shouldn’t they go with whatever becomes consensus in their language? Being correct is overall less important than being understood. And that’s being understood by your peers, not the people on the other end of the world.
With place names it’s often old conflicts and historical differences that prevent adoption of modern place names. English is one of the few languages that made the change from Peking to Beijing, others didn’t want to be told “by the commies” what to call the city. People who were fighting Napoleon 200+ years ago still call Nice in France by its Italian name Nizza, the name of the city in circulation prior to the French takeover. Out of principle. Europe, where the spoken common language variety is greater than in North America, is more used to this and people just know Brussels can also be Brussel, Brüssel, or Bruxelles. It’s like the imperial system of measurements: it makes no effing sense but it works.
If you argue respect you’re going to hit a massive wall with some languages. Mandarin Chinese is fresh in my mind that has very colorful names for all the places of the world that often have little or nothing in common with what the locals call it. Meiguo for America? Is that disrespectful? No, when you learn that this sort of means beautiful country. And it would take ages to get English speakers onto the same page calling China Zhongguo. And I’m quite sure the locals of Zhongguo would not understand the average American Joe saying it. So what would be gained by making that switch?
Turkey wanted to change its English name because they don’t like the association with the eponymous bird. If the bird was commonly referred to as something else, and English wasn’t the lingua franca of the world, this would not have come up. Other languages have stuck with their version of Türkiye. And for the English speaking world I see an uphill battle for this to catch on. People only switched to Kyiv out of spite for Russian bombs. People are still going to say Turkey and not mean the bird. Same is true for recent gulf name changes.
English is half filled with loanwords. Dejavu maybe just stands out to you. Parliament, pork, and necessary maybe not so much. I think all can be traced back via Norman French or later. All languages borrow words. Many of them change meaning and/or spelling after being borrowed. This is normal.
All of the things you complained about seem perfectly alright to me. You’re looking for a fight with a windmill.
Since you mentioned Chinese, there’s also an interesting thing in languages that have Chinese characters as their writing system origin and use names based on it (Chinese languages of course, Japanese, Korean and I think also Vietnamese) where names of historical or important people are translated via their written form and not their pronunciation. For example, the Japanese prime minister Ishiba Shigeru 石破茂 is called 石破茂 (shí pò mào) in Mandarin, written with the same characters. (Been a while since I read about this so I forgot the examples where the name is pronounced significantly different and in all of these languages but this is a good enough example)
Now, I can understand that. Thank you.
The irony of using ‘Z’ in the title.
It’s our language; you broke it.
Oh, lol, I am sorry, Americanised. We did break it. Or they did.
All good!
Why can’t they just allow kids in schools to learn the true names of things no matter how hard they may be to pronounce?
The problem is reading, as some langauges have different letters. For example English doesn’t have a “ü”, so using “Türkiye” in English makes no sense. It it just get’s worse with langauges like Chinese or Japanese, which have completely different writing systems.
They should use phonetics and I am mostly talking about the country names not all words. English does use Türkiye now, I hope they do for most. But when there are pictures or a completely different language there are at least a lot of ways to illustrate pronunciation using phonetics, even of foreign language. America’s education system might be improved in this way. Instead of no child left behind. No child left untaught. Then they wouldn’t be behind, aside from learning disabilities and other disabilities.
Learning phonetics markup might be even more annoying than learning extra letters. I always hated those in school.
English does use Türkiye now
That’s news to me. But this is also not an American/English thing. In German Turkey is called “Türkei”, which is also proncounced differently.
It really doesn’t hurt to know a bit of the IPA, at least the characters for your own language… I see so many horrible phonetic “transcription” “systems” people use when describing how to pronounce a word, it’s crazy
why did they decide
Nobody sat down and made a decision to handle country names the way we do. It organically happened the way it did for no particular reason other than it works well enough.
why don’t we change everything back to how the countries’ place names are pronounced by their citizens out of respect
Nobody cares enough to undertake this. I don’t particularly care that people call the US by different names in their languages. People in Turkey aren’t asking us to pronounce their country’s name the same way they do. Most people are happy to apply the inverse golden rule on this, i.e., I don’t pronounce your country’s name the way you do, so I’m not going to expect you to pronounce my country’s name the way I do.
Would it make things harder or would it allow us to grow?
Yes, but I think it would be a lot of work for not much growth. You don’t learn a lot about a place by just pronouncing its name differently.
Nobody sat down and made a decision to handle country names the way we do.
This is clearly false. There was a definite point at which it was decided to call Burma Myanmar, or at a more local level Peking to Beijing.
Those were decisions to change the specific names of specific places, not a decision to handle country names in the general way OP was describing.
There were certain decisions made to specifically deviate from what had developed organically. These are the exception.
For your point about changing their names, we can’t change country names solely in English because there’s not an organization for it.
We only changed the name of Turkey to Türkiye because it requested to be named as such in the United Nations.
It seems like the nations themselves would have to request their names to be changed in all foreign languages for English to adopt it.
Thank you for this comment, I was aware, sorry for not adding as much detail as I needed to get the right answer. Seems I asked the question wrong. Wouldn’t it help to learn these things in general less, make them available to learn at younger ages? If not already, because it would be grand.
What?
In my language we use our names for places. Like London or Paris, we have local language names. For less known places we use the original name, like New York or Birsbane.
Most important is when the name has historical importance for our culture, we most probably have a localized name for it, otherwise we don’t.
And no, we don’t use the “american” names at all
Its cultural, nothing regarding respect.
It would be helpful to know where you are from.
Would it make a difference?
Its not an English speaking country and its in Europe.
My point stand true for all major European languages like French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and many more.
My native language is directly derived from Latin and we have a very interleaved history with all Eu countries.
I am using English here because this is an English community.
Just curious
I think a lot of this is due to colonialism. Back when the Brits were sailing around pointing cannons at people and being delightful they didn’t respect local culture and dialects enough to bother with a “tricky” word so replaced it with an easier version. Unfortunately due to that expansion and the proliferation of English as the most common trade language the English versions tend to stick.
Every language does this. It isn’t colonialism, it’s convenience and practicality. Some sounds don’t exist or are awkward, so a different name is used instead.
This is the correct answer. But I agree with the part it is unfortunate that they didn’t respect and America doesn’t respect enough to say España or ‘la France’ hopefully I am spelling that right.
Ah, so you just wanted to stand on a soap box and let everyone see how virtuous and moral you are. Got it.
Lol, what? It was educational. For me and anyone else who might want to know. The problem right here is I don’t get sarcastic over a question asked in a community called no stupid questions. However, I am stupid for asking the wrong one. So, thank you. Sincerely, tho.
No it’s not. Plenty of countries that never had any colonies are doing the exact same thing in their local languages.
Yeah, but why are Americans doing the same thing as everyone else!?
I really want to know. Cuz America is a Poser?
Its not respect or lack of it.
Its just human culture and how it works. If a place is so common that its names very often, it gets a local name, or it got it in the past.
Changing that would bear no consequence on how we see that country/culture/place at all.
English is always about making everything difficult
Yeah, then they should make us pronounce all the countries correctly. My point exactly.
I don’t want no English telling me what I need to call a country or a city, thank you, I already have that in my native language, ah! :)
