Sure, fine, whatever. Everyone deserves to be called by their preferred name. I find it weird though, because every country has a respectful exonym, so a direct translation doesn't seem wrong, and mixing languages seems even weirder.
I don't know why personal names don't typically get translated, but country names do, so this is not a hill worth dying on. It's just odd to me, especially since they are sticking with the colonial name instead of changing to some indigenous name.
My own nationality (and perhaps yours, judging by your username?) comes to mind, Dutch, which doesn’t even vaguely resemble the way we refer to ourselves (“Nederlands”), but is close to a very old naming of a region in our country (“Diets”, ca. 1200 - 1550), how we call Germans (“Duits”), who call themselves different as well (“Deutsch”), where the word “German” probably stems from Germanic, which refers to a historical group of people in Central and Scandinavian Europe, comparable to “Latin”.
We also translate Paris to Parijs, and Lille has an official translation to Rijsel but nobody uses that.
Sheesh if this were a codebase it would raise some serious questions about variable naming standards.
Pretty sure we had several posts on HM related to the weirdness of translations for names.
But there are cities like Denver. Luckier than others, in that respect ;)
It's a question of "how often do we need to mention this name"; only commonly mentioned get a translation or familiar-alphabet-munging.
Other countries needing to talk about provinces is more rare.
I know of Indian colleagues who go by an English-sounding name that is at least somewhat close to their actual name. Others have anglicized a spelling that is phonetically close.
The main difference is that you can ask them what they prefer as they’re right there.
It’s harder to ask an entire country.
E.g. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_II_del_Reino_Unido
It was a little surprising since I’ve only ever seen the Spanish kings referred to as Juan Carlos and Felipe in English-language media, never by translations.
Imagine if Bavarians insisted that everybody refer to their capital as "München".
Some people do translate their personal names. In china it's common for people to pick "english names" for interactions with foreigners in part because foreigners have huge problems pronouncing native names.
If you're attempting to call to somebody using a translated name, such a person might not recognize and respond to the name, unless they've had considerable time to adjust to it.
On the other hand, one is typically not walking around shouting a country's name to get its attention.
This is not a hard and fast rule, and the translation of personal names has a complex and somewhat sordid history, but there's your short answer.
On the other hand, the variance from countries to cities, provinces, etc... well... I have nothing to offer on that mystery.
like if people really gonna apply this standard they better do it consistently.
Myanmar has the much bigger problem that it has no adjectival form, requiring even the most politically correct people to use "Burmese".
(Technically, that's not true - the official adjectival form, according to Myanmar, should be "Myanma". Good luck getting English speakers to understand that.)
How is that any harder than Afghanistan => Afghan.
First, many English-speakers are familiar with -stan, which is used in seven different country names, plus some region names.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/-stan
For most of these, you can get an ethnonym or demonym by removing -stan or -istan.
Second, the -ar in particular has a lot of trouble with non-rhotic English accents, where "Myanmar" might already be pronounced the same as "Myanma"!
It's supposed to be. Both names, "Burma" and "Myanmar", are formed under the assumption that your English pronunciation is non-rhotic.
The same is true of the common Korean surname "Park", which does not contain any R-like sound. British spellings of foreign words really cause tremendous damage to the pronunciations used by rhotic speakers.
It's such a strange thing to use an 'r' to modify the sound of the preceding vowel, and it's not even as if it's 100% consistent, because all English is a mess.
This expectation also leads to comical situations like the typical British pronunciation of "pasta". I guess the Italians should have spelled it parsta.
Officially, the Queen's English says this is pronounced "drawing". But most Brits feel compelled to insert an R, "drawRing".
It is much like Americans saying "Mel and I", in object context, e.g. "She accused Mel and I", where "Mel and me" would have been right.
Am British, literally no one I know personally puts an extra R in when pronouncing drawing. I have heard it said that way before but you certainly couldn’t say that “most” Brits do it.
I am amused that your sibling comment insists "drawRing" is correct British pronunciation.
They really are compelled to insert an R there. That is one of the phonological rules of their variety of English; it's how you avoid running one vowel into another vowel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R
Complaining about this is the equivalent of complaining about how Americans "feel" compelled to insert a vowel into the name Gbagbo, pronouncing it guh-bagbo. They don't just feel compelled; that is a genuine requirement of their language.
It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and I", which is an artificial rule that English speakers must be taught in school. The form people use naturally is "me and Mel".
> It is not at all similar to any variation on "Mel and I", which is an artificial rule that English speakers must be taught in school. The form people use naturally is "me and Mel".
I think you're misunderstanding here. There's no situation where "she accused (Mel and) I" works. It's not taught in school. It happens because of people "hyper correcting" to match the inverted sentence. "(Mel and) I accused her" which they get corrected to use by the teacher when they say "(Mel and) me accused her".
> There's no situation where "she accused (Mel and) I" works.
That is true.
> It happens because of people "hyper correcting" to match the inverted sentence. "(Mel and) I accused her" which they get corrected to use by the teacher
That is also true. But your own example is telling you that there is also no situation where "Mel and I accused her" works. Sentences in that form do not naturally occur in English; they must be taught in school. The correct form would be "Me and Mel accused her".
Intrusive R isn't like that. It is a feature of the language, not something dictated to speakers by a formal education system.
No it isn't. You'd never say "Me accused her". If you don't like the inversion its perfectly fine to say "I and Mel accused her", but using "me" for the subject is never correct.
Why do you believe this?
- "Me fail English." is considered to be a well formed construction, or that...
- ...adding a conjunction is important in determining whether "I" or "Me" is should be used.
It's just not the case that either of those are true in standard English.
While, in theory, you can have any rule you want within some sub-dialect, that would be a very strange rule indeed.
If you believe otherwise, you are tragically misinformed and miseducated.
Using "me" in subject context is, besides being wrong, a social low-class marker. It does not come naturally to English speakers; it only ever occurs through exposure to the misuse.
There are well-known phenomena like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attraction_(grammar)
which can become conventionalized and eventually part of native speakers' intuitions even though they can be contrary to a more logically consistent or simpler understanding of agreement.
This is not even a theoretical possibility. There are no low-class markers that don't come naturally, because no one is going to make an effort to present themselves as low-class.
You are getting really disingenuous, now. Who are you performing for?
Compare the article on intrusive R I linked before:
> This is now common enough in parts of England that, by 1997, the linguist John C. Wells considered it objectively part of Received Pronunciation, though he noted that it was still stigmatized as an incorrect pronunciation, as it is or was in some other standardized non-rhotic accents. Wells writes that at least in RP, "linking /r/ and intrusive /r/ are distinct only historically and orthographically".[17]
Where footnote 17 cites a paper from 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
while thaumasiotes is referring to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics
There are examples in the hypercorrection article about people adding an /h-/ in a very similar situation, so what you describe clearly can happen. But are you sure that the R example falls into that category?
It seems to be a distinction about how conscious the change is, or at what layer of language it happens. Isn't that an empirical question that could be tested?
Class markers in speech are always a moving target, a sort of low-grade arms race: low stakes for the upper class, high stakes for lower.
So, pronouncing it "drawRing" is a lower-class marker, similar in a way to "aks" for "ask" in American English.
As always, all of these pronunciations are legitimate and produce no misunderstanding.
[*] "er" is pronounced "uh" or "eh", rhotically.
I'm sorry but pretty much everyone who grew up with English as a second language would like to disagree.
Hearing "drawRing" to this day throws me off -- I have to repeat the noise to myself internally to make sure I understood it right.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but their opinion doesn't count.
Foreign speakers have no say in what's legitimate and may be confused by absolutely anything.
That is exactly the opposite of what TillE wrote. If that were how the British already pronounced the word, there would be no need to change the spelling.
> Got a source for your "typical British pronunciation" of "pasta" being non-Italian?
This is just infantile. You can verify the pronunciation yourself in any number of ways.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/pasta (UK pronunciation: /ˈpæs.tə/)
https://youglish.com/pronounce/pasta/english/uk , if you want audio samples.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pasta#Pronunciation (UK pronunciation: /ˈpæstə/)
Source: expat living in Britain
What do you call a one-eyed dinosaur? A dyathinkhesawus. Without the intrusive 'r' this joke would not work.
> In Burmese, the pronunciation depends on the register used and is either Bama (pronounced [bəmà]) or Myamah (pronounced [mjəmà]).
That is, there is originally no R sound in either word in Burmese, as thaumasiotes clarified.
-ese, -ian, -an and -n all come from Latin via routes of varying directness, which is why they feel somewhat "neutral" in English (e.g. Congolese and Japanese both seem cromulent and not intrinsically African or Asian).
I have faced questions from Chinese people about why only Asians receive an -ese suffix in English.
I hazard that words like Cantonese, etc., came either via the same route, or by back-formation to match the existing wider term "Chinese".
Interestingly, "Japanner" used to be another word for a Japanese person.
Austriai?
Norwayi?
But it has not been my experience at all that Czechia was the “usual” word, at least among English speakers in Europe. Nor do I personally find it any less unwieldy than “Czech Republic” but that’s my bias.
Assuming you also speak from experience, is there any easy way to verify this?
I don’t mean the official name, I mean what people actually say in English when referring to the country a Czech comes from.
"Turkey; Republic of Turkey changed to Turkey; Republic of Türkiye"
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/country-names/cou...
https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/the-permanent-committee...
There is the precedent of Burma/Myanmar, "Country name remains Burma reflecting common British English usage". Similarly for Cabo Verde, "Cape Verde had circulated a request for this form to be used, though UK has retained the common English usage for the country name".
However, it did recently change Swaziland to Eswatini and I know which one I'd vote for as being common usage.
The ISO codes are not always adopted verbatim. e.g. The UK gov list does not include Taiwan. ISO plays both sides, giving it a country code but calling it a province of China. On the other hand the UK does include Kosovo which is not an ISO country but is recognised as one by approx 50% of nations including the UK.
Other countries have similar national naming committees to the UK's PCGN, you can see a list here https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/nna/nna-committees/