4 ms·
Do countries get to declare how their names are spelled in other languages?
by throwawayboise 5y ago
Do countries get to declare how their names are spelled in other languages?
- xunn0026 5y agoExcuse me? Of course! Do people get to declare their name and pronoun?
- throwawayboise 5y agoSo Germany really decided that its name in English is "Germany" and not "Deutchland"? I always assumed those names originated externally.
- zhoujianfu 5y agoI’m pretttttty sure it originates locally! Why would the U.S. tell China to call us “Meiguo”, and why would China listen?
- mortehu 5y agoIf that's your whole reasoning I think "of course!" is an overstatement.
- xunn0026 5y agoHN really needs an /s every time.
- clusterfish 5y agoPeople generally do not get to declare how their name is spelled in a foreign language. It's determined by the government issuing them the document containing their foreign-spelled name. (Depends on the country of course, but this is typical)
- sofixa 5y agoOf course they do! For my Bulgarian papers i was asked to spell my name in latin script however i wanted, and when i moved to France I was asked how is my name spelled, and i could change it if i want to (e.g. if i had an s in my name between vowels, in French it'd be read as z; in that case i could have changed the spelling to have ss, which is always read as s).
- rileyphone 5y agoI still refer to “Myanmar” by its true name, Burma!
- bialpio 5y agoI'd say so. Czechia may offer a fairly recent example of name change. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Czech_Republic#Adoption_of_Czechia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Name_of_the_Czech_Republic#A...
- stkdump 5y agoI think a country at least gets to decide what it calls itself in english. For example in official documents that they translate to english. Or what they teach in schools as the 'correct spelling'. Now if the rest of the world follows that is another question. Languages don't have owners.
- _dain_ 5y agoThey do, but only because the English-speaking world is peculiarly susceptible to this sort of manipulation. It started with Burma->Myanmar and Peking->Beijing, something nobody should have taken seriously. Nobody gets mad that Spaniards say "Londres" instead of London. It's funny how it's mostly despotic regimes that get so twisted up about these foreign linguistic matters.