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.
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.
Okay the question should be why do countries have to do this and why is it so hard not to?
Languages don’t have to do it. Languages are organic and evolve constantly. A language is not a set of rules, it’s what people speak. The books just try to formalize it. But each language has limited set of sounds, so older names of places often used only those sounds because people literally couldn’t pronounce other sounds. Or when the name is something totally different, it’s usually very old names for things, ans they often get changed! (recent examples are Turkiye and Kiwiv). You also can’t force people to use certain words, it either comes naturally or falls out of use.
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.
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