It gets interesting when you hear how the Chinese call countries.
Comment on I felt so betrayed when I found out Germany isn't called Germany in Germany
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
Wait till you find out that Germans have different words for all the other things we have words for, too!
Seriously though, the names of countries are just words. There’s no reason to expect them to be the same in different languages.
Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 23 hours ago
FishFace@piefed.social 23 hours ago
Oh, it’s all interesting IMO!
oz1sej@discuss.online 1 day ago
I think it’s so funny that almost all languages have some variation of the name “Hungary”, except in Hungarian, where it’s called “Magyarország”.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
I believe the languages of some neighbouring countries such as Turkey resemble Magyarország more closely :)
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ve always wanted to make a map that used the native names for countries instead of their English/American names.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
rumba@lemmy.zip 9 hours ago
Most of them are fairly expected. That Finland tho…
FishFace@piefed.social 3 hours ago
Etkos puhu suomeä? :)
bobzer@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Looks like they specifically chose the official English names for countries even when the indigenous name is also official.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
They explain the methodology - where there is more than one official name, the name in the language with the most speakers in that country is used.
AAA@feddit.org 1 day ago
Actually I’d argue country names are one of the examples where it would make more sense to have the same name everywhere. Why not use the countries actual name (maybe with slight adaption to the language)?
DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 1 day ago
The United States of America is just a series of English words. It really wouldn’t make sense in some other languages.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 day ago
In Spanish it’s Estados Unidos which seems like a translation of the words.
TheBat@lemmy.world 1 day ago
In Spanish it’s Estados Unidos
USA is EU??? 🤯
AAA@feddit.org 1 day ago
Do country names, or names in general, need to make “sense”?
As for the USA, without any evidence or desire to look it up, I think most languages translate it pretty much literally.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
Why not use the German name for “chair”? Words are arbitrary. Why would you use the local inhabitants’ name for it?
What about when a country has more than one ethnic group with more than one language, which have different names for the country? This is the case in many places. You could pick one, of course, but that’s just another arbitrary choice.
The historical reason is that names for countries (which often develop from names for peoples) don’t always come from the a common source.
AAA@feddit.org 1 day ago
The word for chair is arbitrary. The chair has no feeling towards one word or another. Most countries’ people do have feelings towards their country and it’s name.
Picking one of the people’s names for the country would still be better than using your arbitrary name for the country.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
OK, but most native speakers of a language have feelings towards their own language, and want to continue to speak it as they learnt it. Why should the speakers of a one language have any say over how the speakers of another language speak? What if I feel that Germans should stop using the word “Stuhl” and start using the word “chair” instead? My feelings are irrelevant because it’s not my language and have no rights or interests in the matter.
What happens in multilingual countries? Should the English-speaking majority of Wales be able to dictate to the Welsh-speaking minority that the country is called Wales rather than Cymru*? Should the English-speaking majority of England be able to dictate to Welsh-speaking Welsh residents of England that they should stop using the name *Lloegr*? Or vice-versa? Shall we call Switzerland *Die Schweiz or La Suisse or Svizzera or Svizra? Do you think the German people - or perhaps the German government - should go and tell speakers of Sorbian that they have to stop calling Germany Nimska and must instead use a different word? Do you like where this is going? I mean there were never any problems in Germany before that smell similar to this.
No, this is all rubbish and nonsense. Let people speak their languages. Literally nothing bad happens if you do, and if you go the other way it opens a massive can of ethnically-oppressive worms where one ethnic group gets to tell others what to do.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 day ago
No… I have a name. Someone talking to me in a different language doesn’t make my name different. It’s intuitive to think country names are the same.
Sheldan@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Other languages use different characters or might not even be able to pronounce the name as they don’t have the sounds. It might be simple to think that, doesn’t make it correct.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 11 hours ago
You’d still expect to call them something similar to what they call themselves as best as another language can, but nope!
JackbyDev@programming.dev 21 hours ago
But they specifically said “There’s no reason to expect them to be the same in different languages.” Which there absolutely IS a reason to expect that.
Sheldan@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Expectations end where knowledge begins, I guess.
FishFace@piefed.social 1 day ago
Countries aren’t people though. And depending on language and context, this does happen, and used to happen even more. Finns might refer to a David as Taavi in Finnish. John Cabot’s name in Italian was Giovanni.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 11 hours ago
Never said we shouldn’t be translating the names of countries, only that there is a reason to think we shouldn’t. Because the comment I was replying to said “There’s no reason to expect them to be the same in different languages.”