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Comment on Why do Americanized names of places etc exist?

ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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.

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Zizzy@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
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.

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- bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    That is actually kinda neat and fun :)
    
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- Yaky@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  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”?
  
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EisFrei@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
There are a few more names for Germany, usually chosen by the German tribe closest to the neighbouring country.

Alemannen, Germanen, Deutsche (Tiutsch in old German, euch became Tyskland) and so on.

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HoneyMustardGas@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
Okay the question should be why do countries have to do this and why is it so hard not to?

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- bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  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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