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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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