Comment on "United States" in French (États-Unis) would have made a very confusing acronym

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spongebue@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

And honestly, some of them do just translate (more or less). Like España vs Spain, pretty much any Spanish word that starts with es(consonant) drops the leading e when translated to English (estado, estudiante escuela for state, student, and school). We also don’t have the same o/a suffices. So that leaves spañ, except I don’t think any Spanish word ends with ñ (it makes a “ny” sound to bridge with the next letter, for those who don’t know) and Spain comes pretty darn close.

Not too mention that pronunciations and even alphabets are bound to change. Just how much do you want to stay authentic? Because if I start talking about عُمان (Google says that means Oman in Arabic, and looks about right from what I remember seeing on license plates there) I’m going to lose a lot of people.

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