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.
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?
How would you prevent it? Spanish has an international committee who’s job is to define correct Spanish and they haven’t be able to do anything about regional accents. France has a similar thing for French (AFAIK Quebec isn’t part of it), and they often end up failing in their fight to keep french pure.
Quebec has its own language authority which I believe does have some coordination with the one in France. Quebecois French diverged from France hundreds of years ago though and so uses different phrases and words that sound weird to French people and vice versa.
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.
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
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.
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?
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!
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.
We have been doing this. Beijing used to be Peking. However all that really does in many cases is change from one wrong pronunciation to a different one. The sounds often do not exist in the other language and so the speakers cannot pronounce it correctly.
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.
English is always about making everything difficult
Yeah, then they should make us pronounce all the countries correctly. My point exactly.
